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Simulating IBM Watson in the Classroom

Published: 24 February 2015 Publication History

Abstract

IBM Watson exemplifies multiple innovations in natural language processing and question answering. In addition, Watson uses most of the known techniques in these two domains as well as many methods from related domains. Hence, there is pedagogical value in a rigorous understanding of its function. The paper provides the description of a text analytics course focused on building a simulator of IBM Watson, conducted in Spring 2014 at UNC Charlotte. We believe this is the first time a simulation containing all the major Watson components was created in a university classroom. The system achieved a respectable (close to) 20% accuracy on Jeopardy! questions, and there remain many known and new avenues of improving performance that can be explored in the future. The code and documentation are available on GitHub. The paper is a joint effort of the teacher and some of the students who were leading teams implementing component technologies, and therefore deeply involved in making the class successful.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGCSE '15: Proceedings of the 46th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
February 2015
766 pages
ISBN:9781450329668
DOI:10.1145/2676723
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 24 February 2015

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Author Tags

  1. ibm watson
  2. qa
  3. question answering
  4. student research

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SIGCSE '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 105 of 289 submissions, 36%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,787 of 5,146 submissions, 35%

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  • (2024)Artificial Intelligence (ΑΙ) in Education—Current TrendsProceedings of Second International Conference on Intelligent System10.1007/978-981-99-8976-8_18(191-201)Online publication date: 12-Apr-2024
  • (2021)Artificial Intelligence in EducationHandbook of Research on Critical Issues in Special Education for School Rehabilitation Practices10.4018/978-1-7998-7630-4.ch014(256-277)Online publication date: 2021
  • (2021)Preeminent Development Boards to Design Sustainable Integrated Model of a Smart Healthcare System under IoTIOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering10.1088/1757-899X/1022/1/0120041022(012004)Online publication date: 19-Jan-2021
  • (2018)Robot TutoringProceedings of the 3rd European Conference of Software Engineering Education10.1145/3209087.3209093(45-49)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2018
  • (2016)Leveraging Large Corpora Using Internet Search for Question Answering2016 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI)10.1109/WI.2016.0090(532-535)Online publication date: Oct-2016
  • (2016)How to Effectively Train IBM WatsonProceedings of the 2016 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS)10.1109/HICSS.2016.210(1663-1670)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2016

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