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 judging the keywords individually. (Not to mention, it's parsing enough to at least figure out which words are the ones to use for its keyword search, I think.)
Do you think that Watson is anywhere near the local maximum associated with the strategies you think is being used by that system, incidentally?
Having looked through their overview paper, I'm no longer sure. They do have modules that do parsing and semantic role labelling and such. But their model is a mixture of dozens of individual models. So it's tough to say much about how things are fitting together. They use more sophisticated techniques than I thought, although I don't know how much contribution those techniques actually make in the final decision.
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.)