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How to build your own "Watson Jr." in your basement

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Re: How to build your own "Watson Jr." in your basement

#11

Post by gojomo »

tel wrote: post #9
gojomo wrote: post #5

My hunch is that 90-99% of all Jeopardy questions can be answered with information in Wikipedia/Wiktionary, properly understood. So I'd start with Wikipedia: ~30GB uncompressed full article text. Break it into chunks; canonicalize phrasings to be more declarative, and include synonyms/hypernym/hyponym phrasings (via something like WordNet), so that various 'cluesy' ways of saying things still bring up the same candid…

I'm not certain, but I'd bet Watson was explicitly not allowed to use something like J!Archive as training data. For one, the questions used in the Jeopardy games it played were drawn randomly from previous questions. More importantly, though, learning a stilted, domain specific language model to play Jeopardy isn't anywhere near as challenging, impressive, or worth pursuing than generating something that includes Je…

the questions used in the Jeopardy games it played were drawn randomly from previous questions

I've not heard that, and if true, it would have given Jennings and Rutter, both excellent crammers, a knowledge advantage.

Further, human contestants absolutely review the J!Archive before competing, so why wouldn't Watson?

We don't yet know for sure Jeopardy is only one subset of all the impressive things Watson can do. Notably, in the 'Ask Reddit' answers, the Watson team says: "At this point, all Watson can do is play Jeopardy and provide responses in the Jeopardy format."

So it seems like they're trying to claim the accolades for solving a bigger problem, when in fact they've only done well on a very constrained problem.

Re: How to build your own "Watson Jr." in your basement

#12

Post by [deleted] »

aristus wrote: post #7
gojomo wrote: post #5

My hunch is that 90-99% of all Jeopardy questions can be answered with information in Wikipedia/Wiktionary, properly understood. So I'd start with Wikipedia: ~30GB uncompressed full article text. Break it into chunks; canonicalize phrasings to be more declarative, and include synonyms/hypernym/hyponym phrasings (via something like WordNet), so that various 'cluesy' ways of saying things still bring up the same candid…

"properly understood" is the whole point. That's the hard problem they are trying to solve.

[deleted]

Re: How to build your own "Watson Jr." in your basement

#13

Post by gojomo »

aristus wrote: post #7
gojomo wrote: post #5

My hunch is that 90-99% of all Jeopardy questions can be answered with information in Wikipedia/Wiktionary, properly understood. So I'd start with Wikipedia: ~30GB uncompressed full article text. Break it into chunks; canonicalize phrasings to be more declarative, and include synonyms/hypernym/hyponym phrasings (via something like WordNet), so that various 'cluesy' ways of saying things still bring up the same candid…

"properly understood" is the whole point. That's the hard problem they are trying to solve.

Sure, but it does put somewhat of a cap on the amount of reference material you need to import. And a fairly low cap in the tens of GB: Wikipedia/Wiktionary/WordNet/Freebase/J!Archive is probably enough.

Beyond that, you want software/heuristics. You might find far more data helpful to initially create that software, but once it's created, the reference material to have at hand can come from a small set of sources.

Re: How to build your own "Watson Jr." in your basement

#14

Post by knowledgesale »

gojomo wrote: post #13
aristus wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"properly understood" is the whole point. That's the hard problem they are trying to solve.

Sure, but it does put somewhat of a cap on the amount of reference material you need to import. And a fairly low cap in the tens of GB: Wikipedia/Wiktionary/WordNet/Freebase/J!Archive is probably enough. Beyond that, you want software/heuristics. You might find far more data helpful to initially create that software, but once it's created, the reference material to have at hand can come from a small set of sources.

there is a project on formalization of the human "common sense" with (partly) open source database. take a look: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc

Re: How to build your own "Watson Jr." in your basement

#16

Post by denimboy »

dhess wrote: post #3
srean wrote: post #2

I somehow cannot give up daydreaming wistfully about a personal CM-5. From a previous discussion on HN it seems it still is going to be an expensive thing to build as a toy project. Particularly because of the hyper-cube inter-connection. Not sure if the source code for star-Lisp is available. But I think an emulator lives on at Sourceforge. Edit 1: Here it is http://sourceforge.net/projects/starsim/ Edit 2: Just dou…

I think you might like this book: The Paralation Model, by Gary W. Sabot. http://www.amazon.com/Paralation-Model-Architecture-Independ...

Interesting. Found this article which explains the paralation model.

http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.08/08.07/Paralat...

Re: How to build your own "Watson Jr." in your basement

#17

Post by moomba »

This article doesn't really tell you how to build a "Watson Jr." as they call it. It just tells you to use OpenNLP and UIMA (which is unnecessary, but understandable why its advocated since IBM created it).

I was kind of hoping that there would be a deeper dive into how the data was being stored and retrieved. I'm also interested in the Machine Learning side of it. They don't really give any hints at that as well.

Re: How to build your own "Watson Jr." in your basement

#19

Post by nl »

moomba wrote: post #17

This article doesn't really tell you how to build a "Watson Jr." as they call it. It just tells you to use OpenNLP and UIMA (which is unnecessary, but understandable why its advocated since IBM created it). I was kind of hoping that there would be a deeper dive into how the data was being stored and retrieved. I'm also interested in the Machine Learning side of it. They don't really give any hints at that as well.

Actually, UIMA was used to train Watson (https://cwiki.apache.org/UIMA/powered-by-apache-uima.html).

You are right that UIMA isn't needed, but some kind of tool for importing unstructured or semi-structured data is required.

Re: How to build your own "Watson Jr." in your basement

#20

Post by jamesbkel »

gojomo wrote: post #11
tel wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not certain, but I'd bet Watson was explicitly not allowed to use something like J!Archive as training data. For one, the questions used in the Jeopardy games it played were drawn randomly from previous questions. More importantly, though, learning a stilted, domain specific language model to play Jeopardy isn't anywhere near as challenging, impressive, or worth pursuing than generating something that includes Je…

the questions used in the Jeopardy games it played were drawn randomly from previous questions I've not heard that, and if true, it would have given Jennings and Rutter, both excellent crammers, a knowledge advantage. Further, human contestants absolutely review the J!Archive before competing, so why wouldn't Watson? We don't yet know for sure Jeopardy is only one subset of all the impressive things Watson can do. No…

Can't find the quote this moment, but IIRC the questions(or technically, answers) were drawn from previously prepared questions, but not previously used questions. The point being that aside from eliminating audio/video based questions, these had been designed with humans in mind and there was no tailoring of the content to be "Watson friendly/unfriendly".

That may help explain the confusion.

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