[nl]

I'm currently working on an my own open source version of Watson/Siri/Google Now. (It can answer "What is the capital of Brazil" Yay!).

As part of that I've been leaning as much as I can about how Watson actually works.

The most useful information can be found by Googling "Deep QA" which is what IBM has dubbed their question answering pipeline.

A slide deck like [2] is a good place to start if you are interested in this.

[1] Yeah, I know that is kind of a crazy thing to work on. It's actually even more stupid than you may think, because I want it make it self-hostable, with the ability to keep your own data separately to the rest of the application (ie, enforcing privacy).

[2] http://www.cs.hku.hk/news/2011/WatsonHongKong_talk_ppt.pdf

[xerophtye]

Not crazy at all. I have been dreaming on working on something similar even before watson was announced (though i was just a Freshmen back then). And was hellishly jealous of that team. So I can totally understand your motivations for this.

Do hit me up if you'd welcome help with this. Email is in HN profile

[nl]

You have to fill in you email in the about section for it to be visible. Mine should be showing up though - feel free to get in touch.