[noelsusman]

State of the art NLP system isn't a very meaningful term. You can't really say that Watson was "better" than Google's NLP systems at the time because they were solving different problems.

In general, what they did was not trivial, but it also wasn't revolutionary. Some of it was novel, but novel in the sense that it applied specifically to the problem they were trying to solve. It had little impact on the technology behind what IBM eventually tried to sell as Watson.

Anybody with a bucket of money could have built the same thing at the time. The impressive part was IBM figuring out that it would be worth spending a bucket of money on.