Studio Ousia (Based in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. Founded by Yasuhiro Watanabe, CEO and Ikuya Yamada, CTO in 2007) won a first place at a quiz competition at NAACL (North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, a leading international academic conference for natural language processing technology) by a large margin from the runner-up.

The competition was hosted by University of Colorado at Boulder. Players competed for the accuracy of answers for the Quiz Bowl, a quiz game that tests players on a wide variety of academic subjects and are played by lower school to university students throughout the U.S., Canada, and U.K.

17 artificial intelligence systems from around the world participated.

Studio Ousia answered correctly to 64 questions amongst 85 total questions, while the runner-up, U. Colorado, the organizer of the conference, answered 22 correctly.

The runner-up, U. Colorado has been jointly developing an Open Question Answering System with The University of Maryland and Stanford University. In 2015, the team beat Ken Jennings (a long time human winner at Jeopardy!).¹

(Sample of QA from Quiz Bowl)

The core technology Studio Ousia used in the competition is “Question Answering System” that it has developed using deep learning technology called Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). It predicts answers for questions written in a natural language. It has successfully enhanced the answering accuracy by leveraging its flagship technology called Entity Linking.

Studio Ousia is currently working on the development of the business application for the Question Answering System. The potential for its application is infinite: help desk answering assistance, HR matching system, medical diagnosis assistance and chat bots, etc.