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

[Thomas Bennett]

Shouldn't that be "questioning jeparty[sp] type answers" ?  By the way, in 
testing Watson didn't win every time.

Thomas

On Tuesday 08 February 2011 19:13:27 Norma Jean Hewlett wrote:
> 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
> > _______________________________________________
> > Web4lib mailing list
> > Web4lib at webjunction.org
> > http://lists.webjunction.org/web4lib/
> 
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Thomas McMillan Grant Bennett           Appalachian State University
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