July 19, 2016
An artificial intelligence question-answering system developed by Ikuya Yamada, a student in the Doctoral Programs, has won a competition held at the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), a renowned international conference on natural language processing.
Hosted by a research team from the University of Colorado Boulder, renowned in the field, the competition is called Quiz Bowl and evaluates the accuracy of question-answering systems in a quiz game.
The system correctly answered 64 out of 85 questions, significantly outperforming the runner-up and other systems in terms of accuracy. The second-place system was developed by the event's host, the University of Colorado. The university has been developing question-answering systems in collaboration with the University of Maryland and Stanford University, and their system competed against and defeated Ken Jennings, the famous quiz show champion, last year.
Comment from Ikuya Yamada
I am very pleased to have won this competition.
I developed this system out of an interest in creating systems that become smarter by effectively learning knowledge from sources like the web and Wikipedia. By leveraging past research findings and open-source libraries, I was able to build a highly accurate system in a relatively short amount of time.
Moving forward, I plan to continue my research and development to create an even more accurate system.
Source: General Affairs (Public Relations), Shonan Fujisawa Campus (SFC) Office