Thomson Reuters' Brain

Drawing on a well-known analogy in his field, Jackson distinguishes between a tool and an appliance: A tool requires that the user apply skill to get desired results; an appliance requires minimal user skill or interface to do its job. (An amateur jazz guitarist for some 40 years, Jackson notes that a guitar is a tool, while an amplifier is an appliance.)

Artificial intelligence “has often gone astray by embracing a kind of anthropomorphism,” Jackson writes; it tries “to build human surrogates instead of artificial helpers. In other words, scientists have concentrated upon replicating natural intelligence rather than amplifying or extending it.”

Google succeeds, he continues, because it finds “the right allocation of function between person and machine.” Results are guided largely by the user’s skill in formulating a query, but Google also compensates—by means of spelling-correction features and algorithms that weigh the popularity of sites—for slightly misdirected queries.

ResultsPlus goes even further in combining aspects of tool and appliance to aid online searchers, Jackson writes. While Westlaw does a primary search of court records and statutes based on a user query, ResultsPlus is an add-on appliance that performs a complementary search in other databases and presents secondary sources—law review articles, for example—that can round out a user’s understanding of a precedent or law.

ResultsPlus is built on machine learning and natural language processing, Jackson explains, but also central to its effectiveness is that it uses the primary search results—those guided by the user—to shape the secondary search. (The “metadata” fed into the secondary search also include “West key numbers,” the system first developed by the company in 1908 to identify and organize court cases.)

For Medical Litigator, introduced last year, Jackson’s group brought together content, ideas, and technologies from Thomson Reuters’ legal and health and science divisions. The new product also adds secondary results to primary searches (in this case, for medical terms in statutes and precedents). But Medical Litigator translates common phrases (“heart attack”) to medical terminology (“myocardial infarction”) or expands a query to cover all brand names of a drug (Ambien has equivalents called Zolpidem, Zolpimist, and Stilnoct).

With the Reuters acquisition, the R&D group finds itself working with new content and media. A product launch slated for March next year, Reuters Insider, is a “narrowcasting” television service for traders and other financial professionals. It provides live financial markets coverage, breaking news from Reuters journalists around the world, and aggregated content from other media companies. Jackson’s team added capabilities that turn audio content into searchable text.