Certainly at least a decent step in natural language processing, right?
It's substantially better than other question answering systems, so in that sense yes. On the other hand, it's probably still movement towards a local maximum, rather than a robust, general strategy.
Robust, general natural language processing requires a proper grammar and parser, to get back an actionable semantic representation. That's the kind of language processing module you'll be able to reuse in lots of different applications.
Watson probably isn't doing that. The system probably cherry-picks keywords, and uses a statistical classifier to predict the category of answer expected. Maybe a syntactic parse is used to help find clues, but I doubt it's the main method.
I did my PhD on statistical parsing and am continuing to work on it as a post-doc. We're getting better, but it's still usually less practical than an ad hoc strategy for any given task. That doesn't mean Watson isn't impressive, of course. Watson shows us what can be done right now, and apparently what can be done is pretty damn sweet.
Huh, thanks.
Though it's doing more than just individual keyword stuff. I think one major point is that it's looking at context (ie, I think it's supposed to have at least a basic ability to deal with puns and such.)
Also, I think it is set up to learn the theme of a category if it's not initially sure (via associated questions and answers), and using that info to get an idea of what types of answers are being sought in a particular category.
If it's not parsing, if it's just keyword analysis rather than any analysis of grammar, it's going way beyond just jud...
It was mentioned before on LessWrong, but I feel people might appreciate a reminder:
http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/what-is-watson/countdown-to-jeopardy.html
It's a bit of a cheesy PR thing - I'd be a lot more interested if they connected the program on the Internet and allowed anyone to try and ask them general questions, rather than mixing the program with voice recognition and (heh) buzzer-pushing. Trivia tests are also probably one of the easier challenges to deal with, since keyword filtering alone is very efficient in narrowing down the candidate space.
Still, I'm going to watch it if I can: if anybody knows of a streaming link that is accessible to non-US viewers, that would be appreciated.
(Silly aside: is anyone else annoyed by how "Jeopardy" pretends to invert the traditional question-answer format, while what it does is simply moving the "what is" from the former to the latter, even if the result makes no sense? I suppose to US people this is a rather old complaint, but I learnt about the show today and I'm rather bugged by this feature.)