CBC Spark: IBM super computer takes on best of Jeopardy

Noah Smith on Supercomputer Trivia and Twitter Dialects

by spark@cbc.ca (CBC Radio: Spark)

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Noah Smith is a computer science professor who specializes in language technologies. Yesterday, Nora interviewed him about about two very different (but related) stories:

1. Twitter dialects: can you tell where someone is based on the language in their tweets? Apparently so.
2. Last night, IBM’s trivia-game supercomputer named Watson competed against two human beings in the first of a three-part series on Jeopardy. So how does a computer make sense of trivia questions?

Shorter versions of both interviews will air on upcoming episodes of Spark, but you can hear both full, uncut interviews below, or download the MP3. [both interviews together run 16:07]