All About Machine Learning: IBM debuts first Watson machine-learning APIs

Monday, November 17, 2014

IBM's Watson Developer Cloud now offers eight services for building what IBM describes as cognitive apps, with more services promised later on.

The eight services currently available include:

Language Identification, which can determine what language a given text is written in (from a predetermined set of 25).
Machine Translation, which translates text between multiple language pairs.
Concept Expansion, which can take a colloquialism (say, "tri-state area") and map it to a set of meanings based on context (New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut).
Message Resonance, which can determine the popularity of a given word with a predetermined audience.
Question and Answer, which provides "direct responses to user inquiries fueled by primary document sources." Topics in health care ( "What causes scabies?") and travel ("Which museums are in Manhattan?") are offered as the first two knowledge bases.
Relationship Extraction, which can parse sentences to determine the relationships between components as a way for other analytic systems to better understand the significance of what's being discussed. For example, if fed "Mark Wahlberg spoke yesterday about his new film," it would understand that "Mark Wahlberg" is a person, "yesterday" is a time reference, and "film" is the object of the sentence.
User Modeling, which employs linguistic analysis to make predictions about someone's social characteristics from a supplied text.
Visualization Rendering, which generates data visualizations from different kinds of data -- not merely pie or bar charts, but also the likes of flow charts and node graphs

All About Machine Learning