How to Effectively Train IBM Watson: Classroom Experience

Watson is a question answering system that uses natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge interpretation, automated reasoning and machine learning techniques. It can analyze millions of documents and answer most of the questions accurately with varying level of confidence. However, training IBM Watson may be tedious and may not be efficient if certain set of guidelines are not followed. In this paper, we discuss an effective strategy to train IBM Watson question answering system. We experienced this strategy during the classroom teaching of IBM Watson at Ryerson University in Big Data Analytics certification program. We have observed that if documents are well segmented, contain relevant titles and have consistent formatting, then the recall of the answers can be as high as 95%.