[ezy]

"Watson" was a Jeopardy playing bot.

The main trick behind Watson is to take the various systems (parsers, search, et al.) and hacks (constraints imposed by the rules of jeopardy) needed by a jeopardy playing bot and put them all together.

So, in some sense, you could say UIMA is what Watson did -- because it allowed a lot of flexibility for researchers to combine their efforts. Ranking and filtering becomes of ultimate importance in a system like that because at some point you have to make a decision. However, it is terribly reliant on the other modules at least getting somewhere in the ballpark -- and the ranking is also not, by itself, anything impressive.

So, it's an interesting case of how far you can get by just setting a single goal and slamming everything together -- but as it turns out, for every new domain you wish to apply something like that to, that magic ballpark is hard to reach without a significant amount of engineering & research effort to come up with new systems/hacks combined with a lot of relevant data. In other words, just like any other adhoc AIish system with a particular goal. Change the goal, change the system.

So, of course Watson was oversold, it was a PR and Sales effort from the beginning. Sort of like AlphaGo or DeepBlue -- you might be able to find one or two interesting ideas in the bowels of such a system -- but the system itself is not a generic one.