NLP with Prolog in IBM Watson

[catechu]

While I do not know whether or not Watson actually does this, the paper doesn't mention anything about parallelism -- I suspect that the exploitation of structured parallelism is another handy benefit to using Prolog on as many machines as Watson was using.

(For example: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1867.)

[microtonal]

There is so much ambiguity in language that parallelization is often possible at a very course-grained level. This usually doesn't require more cleverness than multi-processing or multi-threading.

Given that they switched from their own pattern matching language to an optimized WAM, I suspect they use one of the common Prolog implementations.

[mark_l_watson]

Nice article. I haven't been hired for Prolog work in a number of years, but I used to use the language a lot.

I liked the characterization of appropriate uses of Prolog: "excellent solution for the problem of pattern matching and all problems that involve a depth-first search and backtracking."

[steve19]

When was the last time you were hired to do prolog?

I have always longed to be paid to work in prolog since I was introduced to it in college.

[JabavuAdams]

Have you used Jess? If so, do you have any observations on their relative pros/cons?

[swannodette]

Fascinating! Recently I've been falling in love with Prolog and it's possibilities particularly when it's fast and embedded in a Lisp.

[mahmud]

Prolog is awesome as a library, embedded in another "normal" language.

Prolog as a culture is amazing; the depth of it, specially when it's submerged in other disciplines, like constraint logic programming.

But, standalone, as a language, by itself: it either forces your problem into a text-book toy exercise, or drives you to frustration. It does all the difficult stuff out of the box, but you will need to cut through it with a machete to accomplish the mundane.