Like millions of others, I have watched the past two nights as a computer has taken on Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, Jeopardy’s two greatest champions. IBM’s Watson has dominated the competition thus far, held at the IBM Yorktown Research building where I spent so much my time while working for IBM. Watson got to wear the big hat last night with an easy win, but I will be glued to the set tonight when the last night of the match is played to see what happens next. Maybe you were surprised when Watson blew the final Jeopardy question last night, which was looking for a U.S. city, by naming Toronto. This is an example of a “howler”–a mistake so dumb that few humans would make it–that is all too commonplace in the field of text analytics. Find out why your business should care about this by reading my latest article on the Converseon blog, “What Watson and Jeopardy Teach Us about Computers and Language.”
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