IBM announced new natural language processing (NLP) enhancements planned for IBM Watson Discovery. These planned updates are designed to help business users in financial services, insurance, and legal services enhance customer care and accelerate business processes by uncovering insights and synthesising 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 formats. 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 are designed to make it easier for Watson Discovery users to quickly customise 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 critical 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 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 previously hidden or difficult answers, 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 plan designed to help users quickly identify business-specific text patterns within their documents. This is key for tasks like analysing 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 labelling data and training models. It is designed to learn the underlying text patterns from as few as two examples and then refines the practice 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 customisation capabilities: Training NLP models to identify highly customised, 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 labelling and orchestration. Models trained on generic data sets often fail to retrieve the correct 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 labelling with active learning and bulk annotation capabilities, and enabling simple model deployment that can accelerate training time.
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The planned updates announced are part of a pipeline of developments stemming from IBM Research. For example, answer finding was recently made 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 highlights how organisations 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.
