Image by Getty Images via @daylifeAnswering specific questions is in the news, with the rise in popularity of Quora, the social-question answering site, and the upcoming attempt by Watson, an IBM system, to beat human beings at the Jeopardy quiz game. People who are interested in how automated systems can go beyond simple search, and start answering detailed, specific questions, could do worse than take a look at the autumn 2010 issue of AI Magazine, which describes the research and technology, and simple hard work behind Watson. It also has an article about a very different type of question answering, performed by Cyc, in which natural language interface, detailed background knowledge, and deep inference allows clinical researchers to integrate and analyse the complex data in clinical records. It's the first article in the magazine, and it's title is Harnessing Cyc to Answer Clinical Researchers' Ad Hoc Queries.
This Cyc technology isn't just limited to medical applications; it can be applied widely to data integration and application tasks, so contact us if you'd like to apply it to your business problems.
