I am starting to notice a lot of development on large-scale, well-funded attempts to make computers answer questions posed in ordinary language. Three in particular are of note:
i) IBM's 'DeepQA' Project: "IBM has unveiled the details of its plans to build a computing system that can understand complex questions and answer with enough precision and speed to compete on America's favorite quiz show, Jeopardy!."
ii.) Stephen Wolfram's Wolfram|Alpha: "Although it’s tempting to think of Wolfram|Alpha as a place to look up facts, that’s only part of the story. The thing that truly sets Wolfram|Alpha apart is that it is able to do sophisticated computations for you, both pure computations involving numbers or formulas you enter, and computations applied automatically to data called up from its repositories." (From the Wolfram|Alpha Blog)
iii.) The Large Knowledge Collider Project: "The aim of the EU FP 7 Large-Scale Integrating Project LarKC is to develop the Large Knowledge Collider (LarKC, for short, pronounced “lark”), a platform for massive distributed incomplete reasoning that will remove the scalability barriers of currently existing reasoning systems for the Semantic Web."
Will we soon see a leap forward in computer intelligence? Stay tuned! These are exciting times!
[Image from The Large Knowledge Collider Project]
