Thomson Reuters Builds AI Data Privacy Q&A Tool with IBM Watson

Thomson Reuters is introducing a new AI-driven tool, Data Privacy Advisor, powered by IBM’s Watson suite of machine learning technology.

The tool is ‘a specialised data privacy research solution that brings the company’s collection of global legal and regulatory information together with expansive data privacy guidance from Practical Law editors, curated news, and a question-answering feature built by artificial intelligence and technology professionals from Thomson Reuters and IBM Watson.’

Data Privacy Advisor has ‘a next-generation question-answering feature’, called Ask Watson a Question, currently in beta.

It is the world’s first question-answering feature for global privacy compliance and was built in partnership by the Thomson Reuters Center for Cognitive Computing and IBM.

The Ask Watson a Question feature was trained by experts on thousands of question/answer pairs.’Our first step was to teach Watson the language of law,’ said Khalid Al-Kofahi, vice president of Research and Development at Thomson Reuters and head of its Center for Cognitive Computing.

Industry experts, like attorney editors from the Thomson Reuters Practical Law team and research scientists, taught Watson to understand the nuance of legalese, from simple definitions, such as “parties” or “organisations,” to more specific concepts that data privacy professionals manage regularly, said the company.

During the training process, the team solicited feedback from privacy professionals who, along with Thomson Reuters and IBM Watson experts, graded more than 60,000 responses from Watson, helping the system learn and provide increasingly refined responses.

‘Adding the AI capability from Watson to our own in-house AI expertise made a true collaboration between our teams to help Watson understand the law and the context of the questions – not just memorize the questions and answers – so the platform truly helps data privacy professionals find the answers they need,’ Al-Kofahi added.

‘We’re delighted to support Thomson Reuters by bringing IBM’s Watson AI capabilities to Data Privacy Advisor,’ said Beth Smith, general manager, IBM Watson and AI. ‘Watson technology is uniquely suited for data-intensive and complex industries.’

For more information, visit legalsolutions.com/data-privacy-advisor.