Watson is a computer system built to answer rich natural language questions over a broad open domain with confidence, precision, and speed. IBM demonstrated Watson's capabilities in a historic exhibition match on the television quiz show Jeopardy!, where Watson triumphed over the best Jeopardy! players of all time. The new challenge for IBM is to adapt Watson to important business problems and to make this process scalable while requiring minimal effort. In this talk I'll briefly describe the DeepQA framework implemented by Watson, focusing on the use of Distributional Semantics technology for domain adaptation.
Alfio Gliozzo has 14 years international research experience in the field of Cognitive Computing with strong focus on knowledge induction and its application to Question Answering. He is highly regarded as a leader in the Natural Language Processing and Semantic Web research communities, with a strong track record of projects and publications. He was a member of the Deeq QA team and contributed to the development of IBM Watson, the Question Answering system who defeated the Jeopardy! grandmasters he drives a team of researchers and software engineers focused on the induction of Knowledge Graphs from text. At the same time, Alfio is adjunct professor at Columbia University from 2013 where he teaches a graduate course on Semantic Technologies in IBM Watson. He is currently delivering an online version of his course targeting thousands of students in different countries within and outside IBM.