IBM shows debate between humans and Project Debater-ai

IBM showcased a project called Project Debater at an event in San Francisco. The system entered into a debate with a person and was able to present its own arguments for a statement.

The Guardian, one of the news organizations that attended the event, reports that IBM spent six years working on Project Debater. For example, during the demonstration, which was divided into several carefully delineated parts such as a four-minute introduction and another four minutes of rebuttal, the AI ​​had to defend the claim that more subsidies for space travel are needed. Although the AI ​​did not always reason clearly and sometimes did not speak naturally, the system would have been able to present its arguments.

With this IBM wanted to demonstrate that the system can process large data sets of information and convert them into spoken arguments. According to the newspaper, the data sets included millions of news articles. The New York Times, also present at the event, reports that Project Debater is able to debate a hundred topics. An IBM researcher tells the paper that in about 40 percent of cases, the system can hold a “meaningful” debate on those topics.

On a project page, IBM provides an overview of the various areas of research relevant to the development of the system, such as identifying arguments in a document and generating new arguments, as well as determining whether an argument supports a particular statement. supports and assigning a score to an argument. The project builds on Watson, the system that was able to win the final round of the American game show Jeopardy in 2011.