Content tagged with "Work"

Introduction

Being able to deal with typos and incorrect spellings is an absolute must in any modern search facility. Humans can be lazy and clumsy and I personally often search for things with incorrect terms due to my sausage fingers. In this article I will explain how to turn on spelling suggestions in retrieve and rank so that if your users ask your system for something with a clumsy query, you can suggest spelling fixes for them so that they can submit another, more fruitful question to the system.

Introduction

Retrieve and Rank (R&R), if you hadn’t already heard about it, is IBM Watson’s new web service component for information retrieval and question answering. My colleague Chris Madison has summarised how it works in a high level way here.

R&R is based on the Apache SOLR search engine with a machine learning result ranking plugin that learns what answers are most relevant given an input query and presents them in the learnt “relevance” order.

Please don’t cringe too much at my technical explanation of Watson – especially those of you who know much more about WEA and the original DeepQA setup than I do! This was me after a few days of reading the original 2011 and 2012 papers and making copious notes!

At the beginning of the month, I was lucky enough to spend a month embedded in the Watson Labs team in Austin, TX. These mysterious and enigmatic members of the Watson family have a super secret bat-cave known as “The Garage” located on the IBM Austin site – to which access is prohibited for normal IBMers unless accompanied by a labs team member.

During the week I was helping out with a couple of the internal projects but also got the chance to experiment with some of the new Watson Developer Cloud APIS to create some new tools for internal use. However, I can share with you a couple of the general techniques that I used since I think they might be useful for a number of applications