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Cited by 484

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 29 of the 29 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Introduction to “This is Watson”

Ferrucci, D. A.·2012·IBM Journal of Research and Development

Abstract

In 2007, IBM Research took on the grand challenge of building a computer system that could compete with champions at the game of Jeopardy!™. In 2011, the open-domain question-answering (QA) system, dubbed Watson, beat the two highest ranked players in a nationally televised two-game Jeopardy! match. This paper provides a brief history of the events and ideas that positioned our team to take on the Jeopardy! challenge, build Watson, IBM Watson™, and ultimately triumph. It describes both the nature of the QA challenge represented by Jeopardy! and our overarching technical approach. The main body of this paper provides a narrative of the DeepQA processing pipeline to introduce the articles in this special issue and put them in context of the overall system. Finally, this paper summarizes our main results, describing how the system, as a holistic combination of many diverse algorithmic techniques, performed at champion levels, and it briefly discusses the team's future research plans.

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Metadata

Authors
Ferrucci, D. A.
Venue
IBM Journal of Research and Development
Publisher
IBM
Published
2012-05
Volume
56
Issue
3.4
Pages
1:1-1:15
ISSN
0018-8646 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W160318044
Cited by
484
References
29
FWCI
32.93
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Introduction to “This is Watson”. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1147/jrd.2012.2184356
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Ferrucci, D. A. (2012). Introduction to “This is Watson”. IBM Journal of Research and Development. https://doi.org/10.1147/jrd.2012.2184356

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.