Keynote - What Is Watson?

A presentation on the search technology behind Watson, the Jeopardy winning computer. A detailed description was given of the challenges of natural language queries and some of the strategies the team implemented. Approximately one hundred person-years went into the endeavour. The team is now mainly focused on medical applications - providing comprehensive search capabilities to medical professionals. Other efforts include multilingual capabilities and the ability for Watson to respond with questions designed to increase confidence in final answers. Quite interesting but not really portable to our work.