7

IBM
Cognitive Computing Helps Machines
Debate With Humans

IBM is the granddaddy of the computer industry, having been in

existence for over 100 years. Constantly innovating, it dominated the
mainframe industry in the 1960s and 1970s before pioneering the per-
sonal computer concept in the 1980s.

Like other US tech giants, it was not slow to understand the impor-
tance of machine learning. Its best known artificial intelligence (AI)
endeavor is IBM Watson, a “cognitive computing” platform that
became famous when it defeated two long-standing human champi-
ons at the gameshow Jeopardy!1

Since then Watson has been deployed across thousands of business

use cases, and continues to be used by IBM to demonstrate the power
and flexibility of its machine learning technology.

How Does IBM Use Artificial Intelligence?

As well as winning television gameshows, Watson has been deployed
in many industries where its natural language processing capabilities
are driving efficiency and creating new opportunities.

It was originally envisaged as a question-and-answer engine, but over

the years its applications have diversified as its skillset has grown.

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Royal Bank of Scotland uses Watson to power its customer service

chatbot, Cora. Cora was trained on over 1,000 responses to 200 cus-
tomer service queries. It then continues to learn after it is deployed,
building links between natural language questions posed by human
customers and the responses it has stored in its database.2 If a con-
versation becomes too difficult it will pass the customer to a human
agent.

The rate at which Cora manages to handle queries by itself without

having to resort to human assistance is known as the “containment
rate” and is a key metric of its success. Currently, the rate is around
40% (and up to 80% for queries around commercial banking issues).3
The idea is that this rate will start to increase as the bot gains more
experience of interacting with humans.

Stationery giant Staples used Watson to build a “smart ordering” sys-

tem called the Easy Button. Essentially a voice-activated assistant sim-
ilar to Amazon’s Alexa, it is specifically trained in anticipating the sta-
tionery needs of Staples’ business customers. As it is repeatedly used
it comes to learn about brands and quantities that customers require.4

Watson has broken into sports too. The All England Lawn Tennis
Club worked with IBM at the world-famous Wimbledon tourna-
ments to deliver automated highlights and enhance fan engagement.
Trained with data from 22 years of tennis covering over 53 million
data points, Watson was taught to deliver automated commentary,
as well as real-time stats and analytics, directly to fans. A Watson-
powered app called Ask Fred (named after Fred Perry) was also cre-
ated to answer fans’ questions, from the history of tennis to where
they can find public toilets at Wimbledon.5

Watson is also widely used in healthcare. The American Cancer Soci-

ety used Watson to create the first AI assistant aimed at helping peo-
ple diagnosed with cancer, and Watson For Oncology is a clinical
support platform that advises doctors on treatment decisions, using

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thousands of pages of medical documents and case notes to predict

treatment paths that are likely to have the best outcomes.6

If there was one task that common sense would seem to dictate that
AI cannot yet do, it would be designing perfume. Global fragrance
giant Symrise, which makes scents for Estee Lauder, Avon and Donna
Karan, among others, thought differently. The result of their work
with IBM is called Phylira, and it has developed scents – usually the
preserve of human experts who have trained for years – that will soon
be on sale in 4,000 Brazilian beauty stores.

Phylira works by breaking down scents into their constituent parts –

the different oils, chemicals and natural extracts that are used to add
specific flavors to each perfume, 1.7 million of them all together. It
then read in sales data and customer service data to draw links show-
ing which combinations of scents were likely to be appealing to dif-
ferent demographic groups.

The two fragrances that were developed by the algorithm achieved

“stellar” results in focus group testing, proving more popular than
other scents that had previously sold successfully to the target demo-
graphic (Brazilian millennials).7

Watson has certainly grown into a phenomenal success story for IBM
since it stole the Jeopardy! crown. Aside from these use cases, Watson
is also used by seven of the world’s top 10 automotive companies and
eight of the top 10 largest oil and gas companies.8

Project Debater
Perhaps the most impressive application of IBM’s language processing
AI technology is found in its Project Debater.

IBM says that Project Debater is the first AI system that can debate
humans on complex subjects. It uses language processing and a

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database of hundreds of millions of articles covering 100 subject

areas.9

It uses these tools and data to listen to its opponent’s point of view,
considers it, and then challenges it on logical and ethical grounds.

In its first live, public debate, Project Debater took on two experienced
college debaters on the topics of whether space exploration should
be government subsidized, and whether more telemedicine (medical
practice carried out remotely by a doctor) would be a good thing.

On the subject of telemedicine, the audience voted that IBM’s AI put

forward a more compelling argument than its human opponent.10

Although overall the event was considered a draw, it marks a mean-

ingful step forward for AI language processing. The technology has
progressed from recognizing individual words, as has been done by
email spam filtering for decades, to being able to answer basic ques-
tions (as seen in Siri and Alexa), to being able to engage in open, free-
form debate.

Rather than analyzing a human sentence semantically, and trying to

figure out what it wants to know, it must be able to discern a point
that is being made, then construct an argument against it. It can do
this either by citing authoritative facts that suggest the original point is
based on bad information, or by finding logical flaws in the statements
being made.

This technique of language processing is known as argument mining.

In IBM’s use case, it further broke this down into argument detection
and argument stance classification. The former analyzes the argument
to determine the claims that are being made and the evidence they are
based on. The latter determines where those argument components
sit in relation to the polarity of the discussion.11

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It’s worth noting that although Project Debater appears to be able to

tackle any subject, it’s still an example of specialized AI, rather than
the fully generalized AI, which is still not likely to be around for some
time. Although it has expert level knowledge on many subjects, it is
only trained to apply that knowledge to debate. It would require fur-
ther training for it to be able to use it for other purposes, for example,
education.

While it mainly serves as an impressive display of AI competency

right now, in the future IBM theorizes that the rules it is built on (and
those it develops itself) will help humans choose decision outcomes
that are evidence based, rather than influenced by bias, faulty logic or
ambiguity.

Key Challenges, Learning Points

And Takeaways
r Thousands of businesses are using IBM Watson to take advan-
tage of AI. Particularly active areas of work include customer
relations, chatbots and medicine.
r By focusing on language processing capabilities, IBM’s strategy
is to break down communication barriers between people and
machines, making it easier for us to harness their potential.
r IBM uses gameplay to demonstrate that its cognitive systems are
capable of learning to solve puzzles in the same way that humans
do, and with practice can become better than them. This began
with Deep Blue’s defeat of Kasparov and continues with Project
Debater.
r Project Debater represents AI evolving past its current ability to
answer questions, and towards being able to engage in natural
human conversations. This could have all sorts of implications
for the future of AI.

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Notes
1. Tech Republic, IBM Watson: The inside story of how the Jeopardy-
winning supercomputer was born, and what it wants to do next:
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/ibm-watson-the-inside-story-
of-how-the-jeopardy-winning-supercomputer-was-born-and-what-it-
wants-to-do-next/
2. IBM, Raising Cora: https://www.ibm.com/industries/banking-financial
-markets/front-office/chatbots-banking
3. IBM, Putting Smart to Work: https://www.ibm.com/blogs/insights-on-
business/banking/putting-smart-work-raising-cora/
4. IBM, How Staples is making customer service “easy” with Watson Con-
versation: https://www.ibm.com/blogs/watson/2017/02/staples-making
-customer-service-easy-watson-conversation/
5. IBM, How Wimbledon is using IBM Watson AI to power highlights,
analytics and enriched fan experiences: https://www.ibm.com/blogs/
watson/2017/07/ibm-watsons-ai-is-powering-wimbledon-highlights-
analytics-and-a-fan-experiences/
6. American Cancer Society, American Cancer Society and IBM Col-
laborate to Create Virtual Cancer Health Advisor: http://pressroom.
cancer.org/WatsonACSLaunch
7. Vox, Is AI the future of perfume? IBM is betting on it: https://www.
vox.com/the-goods/2018/10/24/18019918/ibm-artificial-intelligence-
perfume-symrise-philyra
8. IBM, IBM Largest Ever AI Toolset Release Is Tailor Made for 9 Industries
and Professions: https://newsroom.ibm.com/2018-09-24-IBM-Largest-
Ever-AI-Toolset-Release-Is-Tailor-Made-for-9-Industries-and-
Professions
9. The Verge, What it’s like to watch an IBM AI successfully debate
humans: https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/18/17477686/ibm-project-
debater-ai
10. The Guardian, Man 1, machine 1: landmark debate between AI and
humans ends in draw: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/
jun/18/artificial-intelligence-ibm-debate-project-debater
11. IBM, Project Debater Datasets: https://www.research.ibm.com/haifa/
dept/vst/debating_data.shtml

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