IBM Watson Health is tapering off its Drug Discovery program, which uses "AI" software to help companies develop new pharmaceuticals, blaming poor sales. IBM spokesperson Ed Barbini told The Register: "We are not discontinuing our Watson for Drug Discovery offering, and we remain committed to its continued success for our clients currently using the technology. We are focusing our resources within Watson Health to double down on the adjacent field of clinical development where we see an even greater market need for our data and AI capabilities." In other words, it appears the product won't be sold to any new customers, however, organizations that want to continue using the system will still be supported. When we pressed Big Blue's spinners to clarify this, they tried to downplay the situation using these presumably Watson neural-network-generated words: The offering is staying on the market, and we'll work with clients who want to team with IBM in this area.

Question Answering (QA) naturally reduces to an entailment problem, namely, verifying whether some text entails the answer to a question. However, for multi-hop QA tasks, which require reasoning with multiple sentences, it remains unclear how best to utilize entailment models pre-trained on large scale datasets such as SNLI, which are based on sentence pairs. We introduce Multee, a general architecture that can effectively use entailment models for multi-hop QA tasks. Multee uses (i) a local module that helps locate important sentences, thereby avoiding distracting information, and (ii) a global module that aggregates information by effectively incorporating importance weights. Importantly, we show that both modules can use entailment functions pre-trained on a large scale NLI datasets. We evaluate performance on MultiRC and OpenBookQA, two multihop QA datasets. When using an entailment function pre-trained on NLI datasets, Multee outperforms QA models trained only on the target QA datasets and the OpenAI transformer models. The code is available at https://github.com/StonyBrookNLP/multee.

In this paper, we address the question answering challenge with the SQuAD 2.0 dataset. We design a model architecture which leverages BERT's capability of context-aware word embeddings and BiDAF's context interactive exploration mechanism. By integrating these two state-of-the-art architectures, our system tries to extract the contextual word representation at word and character levels, for better comprehension of both question and context and their correlations. We also propose our original joint posterior probability predictor module and its associated loss functions. Our best model so far obtains F1 score of 75.842% and EM score of 72.24% on the test PCE leaderboad.

Golf fans who are planning to watch the Masters this weekend will have yet more ways to check out the action. For the first time at a golf tournament, practically every one of the more than 20,000 shots from the first major of the year will be available to view on the Masters website and app within five minutes of a player striking the ball. While these videos won't be live, you'll essentially be able to watch full rounds from the likes of Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy and Jordan Speith without such trivial matters as watching them walk between shots. There is a caveat in that cameras might not capture shots in some instances, such as those from unusual lies, or if a group's tee shots end up in wildly different spots. The Masters attracts sports aficionados who might not typically watch golf as well as devotees, so it's a high-profile way to debut this technology after a few years of development. It should be especially useful over the first two days when the field is at its most expansive, and a player might be unexpectedly putting together a killer round and rampaging up the leaderboard when they aren't a focus of the TV broadcast.

As she met her fellow captains and competitors, all multiweek winners on the game show (including me), she was surprised how familiar everyone seemed to be with each other. Back in 2014, when she made her first appearance, "I didn't know a single person who had ever been on the show," Julia told me. But this time, she marveled, "everyone else seems to have known each other, either personally or by reputation, for decades." They shared years of experience on Jeopardy's secret farm team: quiz bowl. Of the 18 "All-Stars" in the tourney, all but Julia and two others had played the academic competition known as quiz bowl in high school or college.

Question Answering has recently received high attention from artificial intelligence communities due to the advancements in learning technologies. Early question answering models used rule-based approaches and moved to the statistical approach to address the vastly available information. However, statistical approaches are shown to underperform in handling the dynamic nature and the variation of language. Therefore, learning models have shown the capability of handling the dynamic nature and variations in language. Many deep learning methods have been introduced to question answering. Most of the deep learning approaches have shown to achieve higher results compared to machine learning and statistical methods. The dynamic nature of language has profited from the nonlinear learning in deep learning. This has created prominent success and a spike in work on question answering. This paper discusses the successes and challenges in question answering question answering systems and techniques that are used in these challenges.

We study how to leverage off-the-shelf visual and linguistic data to cope with out-of-vocabulary answers in visual question answering task. Existing large-scale visual datasets with annotations such as image class labels, bounding boxes and region descriptions are good sources for learning rich and diverse visual concepts. However, it is not straightforward how the visual concepts can be captured and transferred to visual question answering models due to missing link between question dependent answering models and visual data without question. We tackle this problem in two steps: 1) learning a task conditional visual classifier, which is capable of solving diverse question-specific visual recognition tasks, based on unsupervised task discovery and 2) transferring the task conditional visual classifier to visual question answering models. Specifically, we employ linguistic knowledge sources such as structured lexical database (e.g. WordNet) and visual descriptions for unsupervised task discovery, and transfer a learned task conditional visual classifier as an answering unit in a visual question answering model. We empirically show that the proposed algorithm generalizes to out-of-vocabulary answers successfully using the knowledge transferred from the visual dataset.

Most research in reading comprehension has focused on answering questions based on individual documents or even single paragraphs. We introduce a neural model which integrates and reasons relying on information spread within documents and across multiple documents. We frame it as an inference problem on a graph. Mentions of entities are nodes of this graph while edges encode relations between different mentions (e.g., within- and cross-document co-reference). Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) are applied to these graphs and trained to perform multi-step reasoning. Our Entity-GCN method is scalable and compact, and it achieves state-of-the-art results on a multi-document question answering dataset, WikiHop (Welbl et al., 2018).

To help bridge the gap between internet vision-style problems and the goal of vision for embodied perception we instantiate a large-scale navigation task - Embodied Question Answering [1] in photo-realistic environments (Matterport 3D). We thoroughly study navigation policies that utilize 3D point clouds, RGB images, or their combination. Our analysis of these models reveals several key findings. We find that two seemingly naive navigation baselines, forward-only and random, are strong navigators and challenging to outperform, due to the specific choice of the evaluation setting presented by [1]. We find a novel lossweighting Figure 1: We extend EmbodiedQA [1] to photorealstic environments, scheme we call Inflection Weighting to be important our agent is spawned in a perceptually and semantically when training recurrent models for navigation with behavior novel environment and tasked with answering a cloning and are able to out perform the baselines question about that environment. We examine the agent's with this technique. We find that point clouds provide a ability to navigate the environment and answer the question richer signal than RGB images for learning obstacle avoidance, by perceiving its environment through point clouds, RGB motivating the use (and continued study) of 3D deep images, or a combination of the two.

In 2014, IBM opened swanky new headquarters for its artificial intelligence division, known as IBM Watson. Inside the glassy tower in lower Manhattan, IBMers can bring prospective clients and visiting journalists into the "immersion room," which resembles a miniature planetarium. There, in the darkened space, visitors sit on swiveling stools while fancy graphics flash around the curved screens covering the walls. It's the closest you can get, IBMers sometimes say, to being inside Watson's electronic brain. One dazzling 2014 demonstration of Watson's brainpower showed off its potential to transform medicine using AI--a goal that IBM CEO Virginia Rometty often calls the company's moon shot. In the demo, Watson took a bizarre collection of patient symptoms and came up with a list of possible diagnoses, each annotated with Watson's confidence level and links to supporting medical literature. Within the comfortable confines of the dome, Watson never failed to impress: Its memory banks held knowledge of every rare disease, and its processors weren't susceptible to the kind of cognitive bias that can throw off doctors. It could crack a tough case in mere seconds. If Watson could bring that instant expertise to hospitals and clinics all around the world, it seemed possible that the AI could reduce diagnosis errors, optimize treatments, and even alleviate doctor shortages--not by replacing doctors but by helping them do their jobs faster and better.