UW CSE’s Oren Etzioni is quoted in this New York Times article:
“But parsing and categorizing language, with its ambiguity and subtlety, remains a formidable hurdle for computers. So the challenge facing Watson was far greater than the one I.B.M. overcame in 1997 with its Deep Blue chess-playing computer, which beat the world champion Garry Kasparov.
“‘It’s a lot more difficult for a computer to understand language at the level of an 8-year-old than to beat a grandmaster at chess,’ observed Oren Etzioni, a computer scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle.”
Read the article here.