ARMONK, N.Y., Nov. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM
(NYSE: IBM) today announced new natural language
processing (NLP) enhancements planned for IBM Watson Discovery.
These planned updates are designed to help business users in
industries such as financial services, insurance and legal services
enhance customer care and accelerate business processes by
uncovering insights and synthesizing information from complex
documents.
Businesses are increasingly turning to NLP and machine learning
to help them comb through rising volumes of documents and data sets
in a wide range of formats1. By applying AI to get
document insights, business users can reduce research time and help
their employees make more fact-driven decisions during complex,
time sensitive tasks such as processing insurance claims,
conducting financial analyses and reviewing legal agreements or
contracts.
The new planned features that IBM announced today are designed
to make it easier for Watson Discovery users to quickly customize
the underlying NLP models on the unique language of their business.
Stemming from NLP advancements developed by IBM Research, business
users can train Watson Discovery to help read, understand and
surface more precise insights from large sets of complex,
industry-specific documents even if they don't have significant
data science skills.
- Pre-trained document structure understanding: Watson
Discovery's Smart Document Understanding feature, available now in
the Plus, Enterprise and Premium plans, includes a new pre-trained
model that is designed to automatically understand the visual
structure and layout of a document without additional training from
a developer or data scientist. This helps users quickly find
answers that were previously hidden or difficult to find like text
in complex table structures or images.
- Automatic text pattern detection: IBM has released a new
advanced pattern creation feature in beta in the Plus, Premium and
Enterprise plans that is designed to help users quickly identify
business-specific text patterns within their documents. This is key
for tasks like analyzing massive amounts of contracts or financial
reports, which may report the same type of information, such as an
increase or decrease in revenue, in different formats or using
different phrases. Developed by IBM Research, it helps provide
efficient ways of labeling data and training models. It is designed
to start learning the underlying text patterns from as few as two
examples and then refines the pattern based on user feedback. This
helps users more rapidly train a model without manual and
time-intensive tasks like defining rules and expressions.
- Advanced NLP customization capabilities: Training NLP
models to identify highly customized, business-specific words and
phrases – for example insurance claim forms may include specific
claim reasons or affected products – is a time-consuming task that
requires significant data prep, labeling, and orchestration. Models
trained on generic data sets often fail to retrieve the right
information. With a new custom entity extractor feature, now
available in beta for Watson Discovery Premium users, IBM is
simplifying this process by reducing the effort for data prep,
simplifying labeling with active learning and bulk annotation
capabilities, and enabling simple model deployment that can
accelerate training time.
The planned updates announced today are part of a pipeline of
developments stemming from IBM Research. For example, answer
finding was recently made generally available in Watson Discovery
and Watson Assistant's Search Skill. It is designed to help busy
professionals and customers identify the precise insights they
need.
"The stream of innovation coming to IBM Watson from IBM Research
is why global businesses in the fields of financial services,
insurance and legal services turn to IBM to help detect emerging
business trends, gain operational efficiency and empower their
workers to uncover new insights," said Daniel Hernandez, General Manager of Data and
AI, IBM. "The pipeline of natural language processing innovations
we're adding to Watson Discovery can continue to provide businesses
with the capabilities to more easily extract the signal from the
noise and better serve their customers and employees."
In addition to the new features announced today, IBM is
highlighting how organizations in the legal services, financial
services and insurance sectors use Watson Discovery's existing
features to help automate and transform business processes.
Contract management can be a slow, manual and complex process.
IBM business partner ContractPodAi, an award-winning
provider of the AI-powered contract lifecycle management
(CLM) led solution 'One Legal Platform', extended its
end-to-end solution with several AI technologies including IBM
Watson Discovery, among other providers. The solution helps
simplify the complexities of contract management, automate mundane
tasks and transform complicated workflows. Building on the strength
of ContractPodAi's CLM solution, the no-code platform is
designed to help in-house legal teams manage many legal
scenarios, processes, or documents using the platform's pre-built
and configurable applications, such as claims, RFP review, and IP
portfolio management.
To learn more about Watson Discovery, please visit:
https://www.ibm.com/cloud/watson-discovery
About IBM Watson
Watson is IBM's AI technology for
business, helping organizations to better predict and shape future
outcomes, automate complex processes, and optimize employees' time.
Watson has evolved from an IBM
Research project, to experimentation, to a scaled, open set of
products that run anywhere. With more than 40,000 client
engagements, Watson is being
applied by leading global brands across a variety of industries to
transform how people work. To learn more, visit:
https://www.ibm.com/watson.
Forward-Looking and Cautionary
Statements
IBM's statements regarding its plans,
directions, and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without
notice at IBM's sole discretion. Information
regarding potential future products is intended to outline our
general product direction and it should not be relied on in making
a purchasing decision. The information mentioned regarding
potential future products is not a commitment, promise, or legal
obligation to deliver any material, code or functionality.
Information about potential future products may not be incorporated
into any contract. The development, release, and timing of any
future features or functionality described for our products remains
at our sole discretion.
All client examples cited or described are presented as
illustrations of the manner in which some clients have used IBM
products and the results they may have achieved. Actual
environmental costs and performance characteristics will vary
depending on individual client configurations and
conditions.
Media Contact:
Sarah
Murphy
IBM Media Relations
srmurphy@us.ibm.com
1 IBM and Morning Consult: Global AI Adoption Index
2021
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SOURCE IBM