J. William Murdock

contact information

Researcher, DeepQA (Watson) project
Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY USA

links

Professional Associations

Professional Associations: Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)

2022

Bring your own search to IBM Watson Assistant
J William Murdock and Arnesh Batlaw
Medium, 2022
Abstract

Enriching your documents can make search more effective
J William Murdock and Sudarshan Thitte
IBM Watson Apps Community, 2022
Abstract

2021

Turn your FAQ pages into conversational AI
J William Murdock, Guy Lev, Michal Shmueli-Scheuer, Jaymin Desai, Anastas Stoyanovsky, Christophe Guittet, Jim Hurne, Ofir Florenz, and David Konopnicki
Medium, 2021
Abstract

2020

Answer Finding API beta in Watson Discovery v2
J William Murdock
IBM Watson Apps Community, 2020

Finding concise answers to questions in enterprise documents
J. William Murdock, Avi Sil, Anastas Stoyanovsky, Christophe Guittet
Medium, 2020
Abstract

ARES: A Reading Comprehension Ensembling Service
Anthony Ferritto, Lin Pan, Rishav Chakravarti, Salim Roukos, Radu Florian, J. William Murdock, Avi Sil
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations, pp. 31-37, Association for Computational Linguistics
Abstract

COVID-19 -- Are Your Virtual Assistant's Answers Up-To-Date?
Christophe Guittet, Anastas Stoyanovsky and J William Murdock
Medium, 2020
Abstract

IBM Watson Discovery: Relevancy training for time-sensitive users
J William Murdock
Medium, 2020
Abstract

2019

Improve your natural language query results from Watson Discovery
Anish Mathur, J William Murdock, John Pecorari
IBM Developer Blog, 2019
Abstract

2018

Engineered AI Still Matters for Question Answering
J. William Murdock, Lin Pan, Chung-Wei Hang, Mary Swift, Zhiguo Wang, Chris Nolan, Prathyusha Peddi, Nisarga Markandaiah, Eunyoung Ha, Kazi Hasan, Yang Yu, and Wei Zhang
Advances in Cognitive Systems6, 2018
Abstract

Many question-answering systems rely on a significant amount of engineering effort. They often require both knowledge bases and rules, which can be very expensive to create. Even when these systems rely heavily on statistical machine learning, there is also an enormous amount of effort spent on identifying what features are useful for learning and implementing capabilities (often using knowledge bases and rules) to assign values to those features. However, in recent years an alternative approach has been growing in popularity: single-strategy systems in which one statistical model is used to address the entire task. These models take in questions and content and produce answers from that content. Of course, configuring a statistical learning system (e.g., deciding on the structure of a neural network) requires some engineering work, but it can be vastly less. As a result, people building practical question-answering systems for commercial use have an incentive to prefer this kind of technology: it is cheaper to develop. Furthermore, there is mounting evidence in the field of reading comprehension to suggest that single-strategy statistical models are extremely effective at answering questions. However, we believe that this evidence is a misleading artifact of the way that the reading comprehension task has been formalized. We explore two types of data: for conventional reading comprehension and for end-to-end factoid question answering. We show that the former is extraordinarily well suited to pure statistical methods and there is little additional benefit from engineered knowledge and rules. However, we also show that this result does not generalize to factoid question answering, where engineered knowledge and rules have substantially more impact. We conclude that the dramatic success of purely statistical methods on conventional reading comprehension reflect the artificially constrained nature of the problem and that engineered knowledge and rules remain useful for more realistic and open-ended tasks.

2017

WatsonPaths: Scenario-Based Question Answering and Inference over Unstructured Information
Adam Lally, Sugato Bagchi, Michael A Barborak, David W Buchanan, Jennifer Chu-Carroll, David A Ferrucci, Michael R Glass, Aditya Kalyanpur, Erik T Mueller, J William Murdock, Siddharth Patwardhan, John M Prager
AI Magazine 38(2), 38, 2017
Abstract

2016

How to select a threshold for acting using confidence scores
J William Murdock
Watson blog, 2016
Abstract

2015

Decision Making in IBM Watsonâ„¢ Question Answering
Murdock, J William
Ontology Summit 2015. Web presentations
Abstract

Unsupervised Entity-Relation Analysis in IBM Watson
Aditya Kalyanpur, J William Murdock
Proceedings of the Third Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems (ACS 2015)
Abstract

2014

WatsonPaths: Scenario-based Question Answering and Inference over Unstructured Information
Adam Lally, Sugato Bachi, Michael A. Barborak, David W. Buchanan, Jennifer Chu-Carroll, David A. Ferrucci*, Michael R. Glass, Aditya Kalyanpur, Erik T. Mueller, J. William Murdock, Siddharth Patwardhan, John M. Prager, Christopher A. Welty.
IBM Research Report RC25489, IBM, 2014

2013

Tools and Methods for Building Watson
Eric Brown, Eddie Epstein, J William Murdock, Tong-Haing Fin
IBM Research Report RC25356, 2013
Abstract

2012

Multi-dimensional feature merger for Question Answering
Apoorv Agarwal, J William Murdock, Jennifer Chu-Carroll, Adam Lally, Aditya Kalyanpur
COLING 2012
Abstract

A Comparison of Hard Filters and Soft Evidence for Answer Typing in Watson
C. Welty, J.W. Murdock, A. Kalyanpur, J. Fan
The 11th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), 2012

Statistical Approaches to Question Answering in Watson
J. W. Murdock, G. Tesauro
Mathematics Awareness Month theme essay, Joint Policy Board for Mathematics (JPBM), 2012

Textual evidence gathering and analysis
J. W. Murdock, J. Fan, A. Lally, H. Shima, B. K. Boguraev
IBM Journal of Research and Development 56(3/4), 8:1 - 8:14, 2012
Abstract

Structured Data and Inference in DeepQA
A. Kalyanpur, B. Boguraev, S. Patwardhan, J.W. Murdock, A. Lally, C. Welty, J. Prager, B. Coppola, A. Fokoue
IBM Journal of Research and Development 56(3/4), 10:1 - 10:14, IBM, 2012

Identifying implicit relationships
J. Chu-Carroll, E. W. Brown, A. Lally, J. W. Murdock
IBM Journal of Research and Development 56(3/4), 12:1 - 12:10, 2012

A framework for merging and ranking of answers in DeepQA
D. C. Gondek, A. Lally, A. Kalyanpur, J. W. Murdock, P. Duboue, L. Zhang, Y. Pan, Z. M. Qiu, C. Welty
IBM Journal of Research and Development 56(3/4), 14:1 - 14:12, 2012

Deep parsing in Watson
MC McCord, JW Murdock, BK Boguraev
IBM Journal of Research and Development 56(3/4), 3:1 - 3:15, 2012

Typing candidate answers using type coercion
JW Murdock, A Kalyanpur, C Welty, J Fan, DA Ferrucci, DC Gondek, L Zhang, H Kanayama
IBM Journal of Research and Development 56(3/4), 7:1 - 7:13, IBM, 2012
Abstract

2011

Mining Knowledge from Large Corpora for Type Coercion in Question Answering
James Fan, Aditya Kalyanpur, J. William Murdock, and Branimir K. Boguraev
Web Scale Knowledge Extraction (WEKEX) Workshop at International Semantic Web Conference, 2011

Structure Mapping for Jeopardy! Clues
J William Murdock
19th International Conference on Case Based Reasoning (ICCBR'11), pp. 6-10, Springer-Verlag, 2011

2010

Building Watson: An Overview of the DeepQA Project
D Ferrucci, E Brown, J Chu-Carroll, J Fan, D Gondek, AA Kalyanpur, A Lally, J. William Murdock, E Nyberg, J Prager, N Schlaefer, and C Welty
AI Magazine 31(3), 59-79, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, 2010

2009

Towards the Open Advancement of Question Answering Systems
D Ferrucci, E Nyberg, J Allan, K Barker, E Brown, J Chu-Carroll, A Ciccolo, P Duboue, J Fan, D Gondek, E Hovy, B Katz, A Lally, M McCord, P Morarescu, J. William Murdock, B Porter, J Prager, T Strzalkowski, C Welty, W Zadrozny
IBM Research Report RC24789, IBM Research Report. RC24789 (W0904-093), IBM Research, New York, 2009

2008

Meta-case-based reasoning: Self-improvement through self-understanding
JW Murdock, AK Goel
Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 20(1), 1-36, Taylor & Francis, Inc., 2008
Abstract

SemantiClean: Cleaning Noisy Data Using Semantic Technology
C Welty, JW Murdock, J Fan
Language Resources and Evaluation 42(4), 395-408, Springer Netherlands, 2008

2007

Scalable cleanup of information extraction data using ontologies
J Dolby, J Fan, A Fokoue, A Kalyanpur, A Kershenbaum, L Ma, JW Murdock, K Srinivas, C Welty
Proceedings of the 6th international The semantic web and 2nd Asian conference on Asian semantic web conference, pp. 100--113, Springer, 2007
Abstract

COALA: A Tool for Inter-document Coreference Resolution Evaluation
B Andrews, J Fan, JW Murdock, C Welty
AAAI 2007 Spring Symposium Series: Machine Reading

IBM in TREC2006 Enterprise Track
J Chu-Carroll, G Averboch, P Duboue, D Gondek, JW Murdock, J Prager, P Hoffmann, J Wiebe
The Fifteenth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 2006) Proceedings, 2007

2006

Coreference resolution on RDF Graphs generated from Information Extraction: first results
M Yatskevich, C Welty, JW Murdock
ISWC'06 Workshop on Web Content Mining with Human Language Technologies, 2006

Overview of Component Services for Knowledge Integration in UIMA (a.k.a. SUKI)
D Ferrucci, JW Murdock, C Welty
IBM Research Report RC24074, IBM, 2006

Towards an Interoperability Standard for Text and Multi-Modal Analytics
David Ferrucci, Adam Lally, Daniel Gruhl, Edward Epstein, Marshall Schor, J. William Murdock, Andy Frenkiel, Eric W. Brown, Thomas Hampp, Yurdaer Doganata, Christopher Welty, Lisa Amini, Galina Kofman, Lev Kozakov, Yosi Mass
IBM Research Report RC24122, 2006

Obtaining Formal Knowledge from Informal Text Analysis
J W Murdock, C Welty
IBM Research Report RC23961, 2006

Towards knowledge acquisition from information extraction
C Welty, J Murdock
The Semantic Web-ISWC 2006, 709--722, Springer

Explaining conclusions from diverse knowledge sources
J. William Murdock, Deborah L. McGuinness, Paulo Pinheiro da Silva, Chris Welty, and David Ferrucci
Proceedings of the 5th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC'06), 2006

A view of OWL from the field: Use cases and experiences
A Kershenbaum, A Fokoue, C Patel, C Welty, E Schonberg, J Cimino, L Ma, K Srinivas, R Schloss, J W Murdock
W3C Web Ontology Language (OWL) - Experiences and Directions Workshop, 2006

2005

Using model-based reflection to guide reinforcement learning
P Ulam, A Goel, J Jones, J W Murdock
Proceedings of the IJCAI 2005 Workshop on Reasoning, Representation and Learning in Computer Games

Exposing Extracted Knowledge Supporting Answers
D L McGuinness, P P Silva da, J W Murdock, D Ferrucci
Technical Report KSL-05-03, Knowledge Systems Laboratory, Stanford University, 2005

An Extension to PDDL: Actions with Embedded Code Calls
O Ilghami, J W Murdock
Proceedings of the ICAPS 2005 Workshop on Plan Execution: A Reality Check, pp. 84

Exploiting pervasive enterprise chronicles using unstructured information management
Anthony Levas, Gopal Pingali, Mark Podlaseck, and J. William Murdock
International Conference on Pervasive Services (ICPS'05), pp. 239-248, 2005

Tracking information extraction from intelligence documents
Christopher Welty, J. William Murdock, Paulo Pinheiro da Silva, Deborah McGuinness, and David Ferrucci
Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligence Analysis, 2005

Encoding Extraction as Inferences
JW Murdock, PP Da Silva, D Ferrucci, C Welty, DL McGuinness
Proceedings of the 2005 AAAI Spring Symposium on Metacognition in Computation, pp. 92--97

The Semantic Analysis Workbench (SAW): Towards a framework for knowledge gathering and synthesis
A Levas, E Brown, JW Murdock, D Ferrucci
Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligence Analysis, 2005

Applications of SHOP and SHOP2
Dana S. Nau, Tsz-Chiu Au, Okhtay Ilghami, Ugur Kuter, Hector Munoz-Avila, J. William Murdock, Dan Wu, and Fusun Yaman
IEEE Intelligent Systems 20(2), 34-41, 2005

2003

SHOP2: An HTN planning system
D Nau, T C Au, O Ilghami, U Kuter, JW Murdock, D Wu, F Yaman
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 20(1), 379--404, AI Access Foundation, 2003

Managing Terrorist Activity Hypotheses
DW Aha, JW Murdock, LA Breslow
Technical Report AIC-03-188, Naval Research Laboratory, Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Decision Aids Group, 2003

Case-based argumentation via process models
JW Murdock, DW Aha, LA Breslow
Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference of the Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society (FLAIRS'03), 2003

Assessing elaborated hypotheses: An interpretive case-based reasoning approach
JW Murdock, DW Aha, LA Breslow
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (ICCBR'03), 2003

Localizing planning with functional process models
JW Murdock, AK Goel
Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Automated Planning & Scheduling (ICAPS'03), 2003

The Semantics of Multiple Annotations
C Welty, JW Murdock
Research Report RC22979, IBM, 2003

2002

Computational Modeling of Cognitive Processes in Plan Authoring
JW Murdock, DW Aha
Proceedings of the 2002 Office of Naval Research Technology for Collaborative Command and Control Workshop

Exploiting Taxonomic Reasoning in Support of Real-Time Mission Reachback Processes
DW Aha, KM Gupta, JW Murdock
Proceedings of the Fourth Annual ONR Workshop on Collaborative Decision-Support Systems, 2002

AHEAD: case-based process model explanation of asymmetric threats
JW Murdock, DW Aha, LA Breslow
Technical Report AIC-02-203, Naval Research Laboratory, Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence, 2002

2001

Method-specific knowledge compilation
JW Murdock, AK Goel, MJ Donahoo, S Navathe
D. Braha (ed.), Data Mining for Design and Manufacturing: Methods and Applications, Kluwer Adademic Publishers, 2001

Self-improvement through self-understanding: Model-based reflection for agent adaptation
JW Murdock
Ph.D. Thesis, Georgia Tech, 2001

SIRRINE2 users manual
JW Murdock, AK Goel
From http://www. cc. gatech. edu/morale/tools/sirrine. …, 2001 - cc.gatech.edu

A framework for method-specific knowledge compilation from databases
JW Murdock, AK Goel, MJ Donahoo, S Navathe
Journal of Intelligent Information Systems 17(1), 5-21, 2001

Learning about constraints by reflection
JW Murdock, AK Goel
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2001 - Springer

Meta-case-based reasoning: Using functional models to adapt case-based agents
JW Murdock, AK Goel
Proceedings of the 4th. International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (ICCBR'01), 2001

2000

Model-Based Reflection for Agent Evolution
JW Murdock
Ph.D. Defense of Research, Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing Technical Report GIT-CC-00-34, 2000

Semi-formal functional software modeling with TMK
JW Murdock
Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing Technical ReportGIT-CC-00-05, 2000

1999

An adaptive meeting scheduling agent
JW Murdock, AK Goel
Proceedings of the First Asia-Pacific Conference on …, 1999 - Citeseer

Towards adaptive web agents
JW Murdock, AK Goel
Automated Software Engineering, 1999. 14th IEEE …, 1999 - ieeexplore.ieee.org

1998

A theory of reflective agent evolution
JW Murdock
Ph.D. Thesis Proposal, Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing Technical ReportGIT-CC-98-27, 1998

Pluto: Managing Multistrategy Learning Through Planning
Gordon T. Shippey, J. William Murdock, and Ashwin Ram.
Proceedings of the Tenth National Conference on Aritificial Intelligence (AAAI'98), pp. 1201, 1998

Modeling computation: A comparative synthesis of TMK and ZD
JW Murdock
Georgia Institute of Technology, College of Computing Technical Report GIT-CC-98-13, 1998

Modeling invention by analogy in ACT-R
JW Murdock, M Simina, J Davies, G Shippey
Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (Cogsci'98), 1998

Prolegomena to a task-method-knowledge theory of cognition
JW Murdock
Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (Cogsci'98), 1998

The role of reflection in scientific exploration
TW Griffith, JW Murdock
Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (Cogsci'98), 1998

A functional modeling architecture for reflective agents. In Proceedings of the AAAI98 …
JW Murdock, AK Goel
Proceedings of the Sixth National Conference on Artificial …, 1998

METHOD-SPECIFIC KNOWLEDGE COMPILATION: TOWARDS PRACTICAL DESIGN SUPPORT SYSTEMS
JW MURDOCK, AK GOEL, MJ DONAHOO, S NAVATHE
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on …, 1998 - Citeseer

A functional modeling architecture for reflective agents
JW Murdock, A Goel
Proceedings of the AAAI-98 Workshop on Functional Modeling …, 1998 - Citeseer

1997

Case-based planning to learn
JW Murdock, G Shippey, A Ram
Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (ICCBR'97), 1997

An information modeling framework to support design databases and repositories
J Murdock, S Szykman, R Sriram
Proceedings of the ASME 1997 Design Engineering Technical Conferences (Design for Manufacturing Conference)

From data to knowledge: Method-specific transformations
MJ Donahoo, JW Murdock, AK Goel, S Navathe, E …
Lecture notes in computer science, 1997 - Springer

Functional explanations in design
shok K. Goel, Andres Gomez de Silva Garza, Nathalie Grue, J. William Murdock, and Margaret M. Recker
Program of the IJCAI'97 Workshop on Modeling and Reasoning about Function, 1997

MORALE. Mission ORiented Architectural Legacy Evolution
G Abowd, A Goel, DF Jerding, M McCracken, Melody Moore, JW Murdock, Colin Potts, Spencer Rugaber, Linda Wills
Proceedings of the 1997 International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM'97), pp. 150-159

1996

Design Explanations in Interactive Design Environments
A Goel, A Gomez, N Grue, JW Murdock, M Recker, T Govindaraj
Proc. Fourth International Conference on AI in Design, 1996

Towards design learning environments - I: Exploring how devices work
Ashok K. Goel, Andres Gomez de Silva Garza, Nathalie Grue, J. William Murdock, Margaret M. Recker, and T. Govindaraj
Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS'96), 1996

Meta-cases: Explaining case-based reasoning
AK Goel, JW Murdock
Proceedings of the Third European Workshop on Case-Based Reasoning (EWCBR'96), 1996

Explanatory interface in interactive design environments
Ashok K. Goel, Andres Gomez de Silva Garza, Nathalie Grue, J. William Murdock, Margaret M. Recker, and T. Govindaraj
roceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Design (AID'96), 1996

Projects and Groups

The DeepQA Research Team

J. William Murdock gen_feedback_link(leftr, rightr);