The recent outbreak of the novel coronavirus is wreaking havoc on the world and researchers are struggling to effectively combat it. One reason why the fight is difficult is due to the lack of information and knowledge. In this work, we outline our effort to contribute to shrinking this knowledge vacuum by creating covidAsk, a question answering (QA) system that combines biomedical text mining and QA techniques to provide answers to questions in real-time. Our system leverages both supervised and unsupervised approaches to provide informative answers using DenSPI (Seo et al., 2019) and BEST (Lee et al., 2016). Evaluation of covidAsk is carried out by using a manually created dataset called COVID-19 Questions which is based on facts about COVID-19. We hope our system will be able to aid researchers in their search for knowledge and information not only for COVID-19 but for future pandemics as well.

As we discussed in previous No Jitter posts, COVID-19 has sent healthcare, local government, and other customer service operations into a tailspin, with physical contact centers shutting down just as they need to deal with a barrage of questions around the disease. In response, contact center providers are scrambling to help these customers spin up home-based operations and deal with unanticipated call volumes. In a recent interview with No Jitter, Omar Tawakol, VP and GM of Cisco Contact Center, shared how Cisco is helping businesses get up and running quickly with its cloud platform, Webex Contact Center; support remote agents; and deflect calls onto AI capabilities to ease the load on live agents. Over the last couple of weeks, Cisco has helped one customer shift 10,000 agents into a work-from-home scenario, and another bring on 1,000 agents to answer COVID-19 questions coming in from around the country, he cited as just two of many examples. All told, Cisco provides contact center technology to over 36,000 customers (on-prem plus cloud) and hosts 3.6 million agents globally, many of are overwhelmed by the global pandemic, Tawakol said.

IBM will make its Watson artificial intelligence software available for free, so government agencies, businesses, universities and healthcare institutions can use intelligent bots to answer citizens' queries about the unfolding COVID-19 crisis. The software will be available for free for at least 90 days, meaning organisations can use it to create chatbots to alleviate demand and waiting times on customer service phone numbers. IBM's Watson AI software will be free for organisations to create customer service bots, which can talk to people about their COVID-19 queries. The free service is already being used by organisations in the US and across Europe and the company said it could be added into existing mobile phone apps, or online apps such as the newly released Australian government's, to provide information and advice about the pandemic. In a statement IBM's general manager of data and AI Rob Thomas said it was putting years of experience in helping businesses use natural language processing, out into the market for use.

With COVID-19 affecting 206 countries, areas and territories, IBM (NYSE: IBM) is helping government agencies, healthcare organizations and academic institutions throughout the world use AI to put critical data and information into the hands of their citizens. With a flood of information requests from citizens, wait times in many areas to receive answers can exceed two hours. Available for no charge for at least 90 days and available to our client's citizens online or by phone, IBM Watson Assistant for Citizens on the IBM public cloud brings together Watson Assistant, Natural Language Processing capabilities from IBM Research, and state-of-art enterprise AI search capabilities with Watson Discovery, to understand and respond to common questions about COVID-19. "While helping government agencies and healthcare institutions use AI to get critical information out to their citizens remains a high priority right now, the current environment has made it clear that every business in every industry should find ways to digitally engage with their clients and employees," said Rob Thomas, general manager, IBM Data & AI. "With today's news, IBM is taking years of experience in helping thousands of global businesses and institutions use Natural Language Processing and other advanced AI technologies to better meet the demands of their constituents, and now applying it to the COVID-19 crisis. AI has the power to be your assistant during this uncertain time."