What the deuce, Watson?

WHEN the 2016 Wimbledon Championships start on June 27th millions of tennis fans will begin posting on social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram about everything from the matches to the attire, hairdos and headbands of their favourite players. The contest’s organiser, the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC), would quite like to know what the hottest topics are. So it is using a powerful computer to find out.

That computer is Watson, an IBM machine which in 2011 famously won the American TV quiz “Jeopardy!” and nowadays resides as a cloud-computing service. The idea, says Alexandra Willis, the AELTC’s digital supremo, is to use its machine learning and natural language-processing techniques to discover the most pressing topics of conversation among the vast output from fans. Knowing that, the club’s editorial team—which provides content for Wimbledon’s mobile app, its website and its video feeds—can respond quickly with relevant articles, posts, tweets, statistics and images.

The computer system is capable of analysing vast amounts of unstructured text and inferring meaning from it. It has also been trained on all the results of every Wimbledon match since 1877. So if, for instance, fans start tweeting: “Has a Chinese player ever got to the third round before?”, Watson would soon come up with an answer. Similarly, by comparing a player’s performance on any of the 19 courts to past games, it can notify the editorial team and commentators of any records about to be broken or new milestones reached.

The system was discreetly tested at last year’s Wimbledon, by seeing if it could answer questions posed by the 3,500 journalists covering the event. It also did a stint at the US Masters golf competition in Augusta, Georgia, earlier this year, where Facebook and Twitter feeds were plugged in to train the system up. IBM will face stiff competition in the field of social-media analysis from a number of specialist firms, reckons Peter Bentley, a computer scientist at University College London. But for the tennis, at least, it is seeded first.