Watsonpaths: Scenario-based question answering and inference over unstructured information

Abstract

We present WatsonPaths, a novel system that can answer scenario-based questions. These include medical questions that present a patient summary and ask for the most likely diagnosis or most appropriate treatment. Watson-Paths builds on the IBM Watson question-answering system. WatsonPaths breaks down the input scenario into individual pieces of information, asks relevant subquestions of Watson to conclude new information, and represents these results in a graphic model. Probabilistic inference is performed over the graph to conclude the answer. On a set of medical test preparation questions, WatsonPaths shows a significant improvement in accuracy over multiple baselines.