It can be difficult to understand exactly what's going on inside of a deep learning model, which is a real problem for companies concerned about bias, ethics, and explainability. Now IBM is developing something called AI FactSheets, which it describes as a nutrition label for deep learning that explains how models work and that can also detect bias. AI FactSheets is a new addition to Watson Open Scale that will provide a plain-language description of what's going on inside deep learning models. The software, which is expected to be generally available soon, can work with AI models developed by Watson Studio, or any other AI model accessible from a REST API. After being exposed to the model, AI FactSheets generates a PDF with information about bias, trust, and transparency aspects of a given deep learning model.

IBM has unveiled a slew of announcements designed to help businesses scale their use of AI. The company also announced the rollout of new capabilities for its Watson platform. IBM researchers have built a hybrid question-answering system called Neuro-Symbolic-QA (NSQA) that for the first time uses neurosymbolic AI to allow an AI system to offer "and"/ "or" to its recommendations. This will ultimately position the system to perform better in real-world situations, IBM said. "This enhanced reasoning capability comes as a result of an entirely new foundational AI method created by IBM researchers called Logical Neural Networks (LNN), IBM said. LNNs are a modification of today's neural networks so that they become equivalent to a set of logic statements, but they also retain the original learning capability of a neural network, the company explained in a blog post. QA is designed to meet the significant challenges in language-based AI, in particular the fact that the training of NLP ...

IBM also announced plans to commercialize IBM Research-developed'AI Factsheets' in Watson Studio in Cloud Pak for Data throughout the next year. Like nutrition labels for foods or information sheets for appliances, AI Factsheets are designed to provide information about a product's important characteristics. Standardizing and publicizing this information will help build trust in AI services across the industry.

During IBM's virtual AI Summit this week, the company announced updates across its Watson family of products in the areas of language, explainability, and workplace automation. A new feature called Reading Comprehension surfaces answers from databases of enterprise documents in response to natural language questions, assigning a confidence score to each response. A novel module in Watson Assistant called FAQ Extraction automatically generates question-and-answer documents. And AI Factsheets automatically captures key facts on a machine learning model's performance and generates reports to "foster transparency and ensure compliance." According to IBM, Reading Comprehension, which was built atop a top-performing question-answering system from IBM Research, is intended to help identify more precise answers in response to queries referring to business documents.