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The article is scarce in details but this is a real product with real applications. The software uses NLP and ML techniques to sift through large amount of scie
by pesenti 12y ago
The article is scarce in details but this is a real product with real applications. The software uses NLP and ML techniques to sift through large amount of scientific documents, i.e., patents or publications, and extracts relevant entities, e.g., proteins, drugs, genes and their relationships, e.g., how a protein acts on a gene, and lets the user visualize all this and query it using natural language.
I can give more details if anybody is curious. (Disclaimer: I work for Watson)
- pinkyand 12y agoIt sound very impressive and i'm very curious. A few questions: 1. It feels a lot like literature-based-discovery. Is it ? if so , how is watson better than current literature based discovery methods that did create some scientific hypothesis AFAIK? If not please share more details(if you can of course) about how it reaches hypothesis). 2. Does it work well in non biological literature ? Are there any examples ?
- pesenti 12y ago1. I am not super familiar with the space (I am not responsible for this specific product) so I may not answer your question exactly. The discovery product is an interactive tool more than a static tool generating hypothesis. It lets you search, navigate, visualize, query in natural language the literature and the extracted entities/relationships. It uses a lot of pretty advanced tech to do that: * State-of-the-art statistical annotators * Some deep domain knowledge understanding of the entities themselves (e.g., how chemical entities are composed) * Some nifty visualizations * Many component from the Jeopardy stack (you can read the Jeopardy papers for more insights) - deep question parsing, candidate generation techniques, scorers, etc. * Down the line it'll integrate more reasoning techniques along the lines of http://www.research.ibm.com/cognitive-computing/watson/watsonpaths.shtml http://www.research.ibm.com/cognitive-computing/watson/watso... 2. Our first version was focused on life sciences and intelligence, we are expanding it to finance, law, and education.
- pinkyand 12y agoThanks you!
- toomuchtodo 12y agoIs there an API for Watson? Is it possible as a developer to obtain access? More abstract: Watson, based on this article (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/11/ibm-watson-medical-doctor http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/11/ibm-watson-me...), can already diagnose cancer better than a human doctor. Will we see more of this functionality rolled out publicly? Or will it be reserved for use by healthcare organizations?
- pesenti 12y agoPlatform 2.0 is coming in October. It will have many new APIs, the docs and code examples will be public, and we will start opening out for beta testing to a much larger set of developers. The goal ultimately is to offer all these capabilities through APIs to anybody.
- toomuchtodo 12y agoThank you!
- techdragon 12y agoI went through the paperwork pile to apply to round one access of the Watson APIs and discovered the shocking restrictions/requirement that the system apparently "needs" unstructured text, and if your dataset is more structured than unstructured they won't accept you into to the program. Needless to say I was a bit annoyed, because I was already using fact extraction in the system I wanted to test Watson's query 'skill' on. I'm in no position to store the raw text. That would require over a hundred times more storage, probably closer to a thousand times the storage costs, making it fiscally untenable for me to even build the database let alone a product with it. Any idea if release 2 in October will change this restriction and give people who aren't sitting on GB of unstructured text, like myself, a chance to apply.
- spitfire 12y agoWe could already diagnose cancer better than a human using decision trees in the 1960's. The breakthrough with computational medicine is actually using it.