IBM Watson Review

IBM Watson Review Summary

IBM Watson is essentially a platform for analyzing language, speech and visual data – the first of these being the main emphasis. Watson’s capabilities were well demonstrated when it beat leading contestants in the game of Jeopardy. It was a good publicity stunt, but applications in business are obviously the real target.

The main component is called Watson Developer Cloud, and this gives access to APIs that perform a wide variety of natural language tasks , with somewhat fewer for speech and visual data. IBM’s Bluemix platform as a service (PaaS) provides runtime and developer services for Watson users, in addition to a wide range of other services (business rules management for example). IBM has also developed, with partners, a number of highly targeted solutions, and particularly for life sciences businesses.

Watson is not a general purpose machine learning platform, but is specifically targeted at language processing. In simple terms Watson allows users to build a repository of knowledge (documents in the main), from which it can learn and perform a range of tasks. IBM’s acquisition of AlchemyAPI has enhanced Watson’s capabilities considerably, with deep learning methods used for various advanced tasks.

In many ways Watson is a marketing front end for a set of cloud based services that process language. The real meat, for IBM at least, is Watson Developer Cloud and the Bluemix PaaS. Several high profile solutions have also been developed, the most publicized being the service for oncology – providing information on which treatment regimes have tended to work best in the past for a particular set of conditions.

Users can get a free subscription to a small subset of Watson’s capabilities, including pattern finding, predictive model building, dashboards and data refinement. It’s free, so don’t expect too much. All the same it gives taste of what is a very easy to use platform.

Watson is a bit of a one-off, and does not really compare with other, more general machine learning platforms (from Microsoft and Amazon for example). It certainly is however, one of the most advanced natural language processing platforms available.

Main Components

Several components constitute the Watson environment. They include:

• Watson Developer Cloud – provides a library of APIs to create language, speech and visual data applications.
  • Language is by far the most significant capability with multiple APIs.
    • The AlchemyLanguage APIs address functions such as entity extraction, sentiment analysis, keyword extraction, concept tagging, relation extraction, taxonomy classification, author extraction, and several others. Emotion analysis has just been added and is in beta at the time of writing.
    • Concept Insights supports concept exploration and recommendation of related documents.
    • IBM Watson Dialog enables a developer to automate branching conversations between a user and your application. The Dialog service enables your applications to use natural language to automatically respond to user questions, cross-sell and up-sell, walk users through processes or applications, or even hand-hold users through difficult tasks.
    • Personality Insights extracts and analyzes a spectrum of personality attributes to help discover actionable insights about people and entities, and in turn guides end users to highly personalized interactions. The service outputs personality characteristics that are divided into three dimensions: the Big 5, Values, and Needs.
    • Natural Language Classifier service interprets the intent behind text and returns a corresponding classification with associated confidence levels.
    • Tone Analyzer Service uses linguistic analysis to detect three types of tones from written text: emotions, social tendencies, and writing style. Emotions identified include things like anger, fear, joy, sadness, and disgust. Identified social tendencies include things from the Big Five personality traits used by some psychologists.
    • Other services include document conversion, relationship extraction, and retrieve and rank.
  • Speech services consist of two APIs to translate speech to text and text to speech.
  • Vision makes use of the AlchemyVision API supporting the analysis of images and returning the objects, people and text found within the image. Two services are provided:
    • Visual Insights enhances the customer view by analyzing online photos and video to extract consumer insights related to interests, activities, hobbies, life events, and products.
    • Visual Recognition allows users to understand the contents of an image or video frame, answering the question: “What is in this image?” Submit an image, and the service returns scores for relevant classifiers representing things such as objects, events and settings.
  • Finally Data Insights provides two services:
    • AlchemyData provides news and blog content enriched with natural language processing to allow for highly targeted search and trend analysis.
    • Tradeoff Analytics is a Watson service that helps people make decisions when balancing multiple objectives. The service uses a mathematical filtering technique called “Pareto Optimization,” that enables users to explore tradeoffs when considering multiple criteria for a single decision.
• IBM Watson Explorer is a platform that accesses and analyzes structured and unstructured content.
• Knowledge Studio allows users to teach Watson using supervised learning techniques. By supplying relevant documents Watson can understand linguistic nuances, meaning, and relationships in specific industries, professions, and knowledge domains.
• Solutions include Watson Discovery advisor for life sciences businesses, Watson Engagement Advisor for self-service dialog, Watson for Oncology and Watson for Clinical Trial Matching.