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Watson the Computer tackles learning Japanese

The Columbian
Published: February 15, 2015, 12:00am

Remember Watson, the computer that won “Jeopardy!” in 2011 and made us all worry about the impending obsolescence of the human race? Have you ever wondered what it’s been up to since then?

Well, like many sudden celebrities, Watson has dabbled in several interests. It visited Capitol Hill. It penned its own celebrity cookbook. And now, in partnership with the Japanese tech firm Softbank, Watson is going to lend its brain power to robots and take on one of the greatest challenges of its development cycle: learning Japanese.

It’s a test of Watson’s technology, which — very simply put — is designed to take in huge amounts of information, process and learn from them in the same way the human brain does. Watson has already spent years picking up the weird phrases, nuances and quirks of English. But this is the first time IBM’s tried to teach Watson a language that doesn’t use the Latin alphabet.

“This is a major step for us,” said John Gordon, IBM’s vice president for the Watson Group.

Doing homework

IBM has fed Watson texts translated from Japanese before; he said it’s been hard to capture the “richness and depth” of the language, a process made even more difficult because Japanese has three different alphabets and thousands of characters.

To accomplish that task, Watson will have to work to improve itself using essentially the same process that students learning foreign languages have for years, though on a much larger scale. It will get a bank of 250,000 words, and turn them into 10,000 diagrammed sentences to identify the subject, object and verb. Then native speakers — yes! humans! — will read its first attempts at translations, correct them and feed the right sentences back into the system. Over time, Watson should be able to learn the language.

“You give it homework problems, grade its homework, and it figures out what’s right,” Gordon said.

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