[Web4lib] AI answering, IBM Watson, whatever...

[Norma Jean Hewlett]

This discussion is very reminiscent of the movie Desk Set (1952, starring
Spencer Tracy & Katherine Hepburn.) BoopBoopADoop!

Watson is probably quite good at answering Jeparty-type questions, it can
certainly name all of Santa's reindeer, and it can probably tell us what
kind of a car the King of the Watusi drives. But it's no accident that the
hottest tech trend right now is "curation" aka selective evaluation of the
quality of information resources. What amazes me is how few people realize
that's what reference librarians specialize in.

Jean Hewlett
Librarian, Santa Rosa Campus
University of San Francisco



On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 12:52 AM, Ernest Perez <ernest.r.perez at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi, Web4Lib folks,
>
> Re the recent exchange by Sloan, Balliot, et al, about IBM/Watson AI
> question-asking & -answering.
>
> Might something like Watson be a good near-term approach for a small public
> or college library? Yeah, if you happen to have a spare 2,500 or so
> parallel
> processor cores lying around. Along with an Industrial-strength IT staff.
> (per the IBM system)
>
> Part of the challenge here is that an "answer" is often not a short & sweet
> sentence or two. The information and knowledge content will probably be
> expressed somewhere on a variable continuum of data and text. The Question
> AND the Answer are always dependent on the context of both the question and
> the user. So the answer has to be continuously spoon-feedable, until the
> user is satisfied.
>
> Twenty years in newspaper libraries, leaning how to use relevance-ranking
> on
> our editorial text databases, and a mid-career Ph.D. convinced me of the
> power of using text analysis to produce "answers."
>
> A more productive approach may be using text-mining to examine the
> "communal
> wisdom" in our existing global network. This is perhaps more productive
> than
> AI in the short- and middle-run. Best of all, this approach doesn't have to
> bother with the storage, indexing, and retrieval of "everything."
>
> Text-mining applications can use the horsepower our network of search
> engines to FIND the topical corpus of information very quickly. The app can
> then analyze the content of the retrieved set of information, and doing
> whatever filtering may be appropriate. (To avoid all the 273,000 query hits
> on Google!)
>
> After retiring from 30+ years of library work, I've affiliated with Power
> Text Solutions, Inc. Our current information service application is called
> "iResearch Reporter."  (iRR)
>
> iRR uses a complex combination of linguistic analysis, automatic synonym
> and
> term variation identification, on-the-fly specialized vocabulary
> identification, text extraction, concept clustering, and formatted summary
> reports to provide "answers" from the communal network wisdom.
>
> For samples of  the reports resulting from queries on the (tongue-in-check)
> sample questions bandied about during the recent exchange please see:
>
> HOW MANY ROADS MUST A MAN WALK DOWN?
> iResearch-Reporter LITE search
> *** Results from analysis of 10 Web documents...
> http://iresearch-reporter.com/themes/me/321/02_08_07_18_37_output.html
> *** Results from analysis of 60 Web documents...
> http://iresearch-reporter.com/themes/me/322/02_08_07_26_49_output.html
>
> ANSWER TO LIFE, UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING?
> iResearch-Reporter LITE search
> *** Results from analysis of 10 Web documents...
> http://iresearch-reporter.com/themes/me/320/02_08_07_10_32_output.html
> *** Results from analysis of 60 Web documents...
> http://iresearch-reporter.com/themes/me/319/02_08_06_55_33_output.html
>
> Okay, these aren't serious answers to serious questions. But I suppose  you
> can say they really do answer THOSE particular questions,
>
> Check out the samples of answers to some REAL user questions at
> http://www.irr-usa.com
>
> That site presents detailed information on our LITE and PRO versions of our
> information tool approach, There's also a link to the main site, which
> offers a 24-hr demo of our LITE product.
>
> (BTW, Web4Lib-ers, if you'd like to subscribe to iResearch Reporter, please
> use the registration page on my www.irr-usa.com site.)
>
> Cheers,
>   --ernest
> ----------------------------
> Ernest Perez, Ph.D.
> Power Text Solutions, Inc.
> http://www.irr-usa.com
> ernest at irr-usa.com
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