Cathy Davidson: Jeopardy operates on far clearer linguistic rules than ordinary speech and ordinary conversation. A 5th grader, even a smart one, doesn’t have Watson’s data base so cannot begin to know all those answers to all those clearly formulated, explicit questions. However, Watson doesn’t remotely have a 5th grader’s life-long “data base” of language formations, colloquialisms, neologisms, and grammatical errors that still “compute” (i.e. you can figure out what is meant despite the error–if you are a 5th grader, but probably not if you are Watson). Watson “hears” questions by anticipating the sentence patterns of the Jeopardy questions and,…
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