IBM Research undertook a challenge to build a computer system that could compete at the human champion level in real time on the American TV Quiz show, Jeopardy! The extent of the challenge includes fielding a real-time automatic contestant on the show, not merely a laboratory exercise. The Jeopardy! Challenge helped us address requirements that led to the design of the DeepQA architecture and the implementation of Watson. After 3 years of intense research and development by a core team of about 20 researches, Watson is performing at human expert-levels in terms of precision, confidence and speed at the Jeopardy! Quiz show. Our results strongly suggest that DeepQA is an effective and extensible architecture that may be used as a foundation for combining, deploying, evaluating and advancing a wide range of algorithmic techniques to rapidly advance the field of QA.
['David A. Ferrucci', 'Eric W. Brown', 'Jennifer Chu-Carroll', 'James Fan', 'David Gondek', 'Aditya Kalyanpur', 'Adam Lally', 'J. William Murdock', 'Eric Nyberg', 'John M. Prager', 'Nico Schlaefer', 'Christopher A. Welty']
Building Watson: An Overview of the DeepQA Project