Watson Discovery Service — Configuration for Extra Enrichments Walkthrough

Watson Discovery Service

This article is for those that have used the Watson Discovery service within the IBM Bluemix platform. If you want more information on the service itself, please refer to Luke Palamara’s article found here on Watson Discovery.

If you wanted general knowledge on the service, you could read documentation or take a course on Watson Discovery and earn a badge to further your comprehension of the cognitive search and content analytics system. This link takes you to that course.

It is free and could take you an hour or so to complete.

Watson Discovery — NLU Enrichment Configuration

Starting around July 18th of 2017, IBM Watson Discovery service has a new enrichment configuration called Natural Language Understanding.

You might notice this when you go to the Discovery Tooling within the Discovery service instance you have provisioned within your IBM Bluemix account.

Default and Custom Configurations

With the default configuration you can add cognitive metadata and thus greater semantic understanding of your data from that cognitive enrichment with four Watson functions — Entity Extraction, Sentiment Analysis, Category Classification, and Concept Tagging.

But there are three more Watson enrichments you can utilize as well for a total of seven, and those are Keyword Extraction, Emotion Analysis, and Semantic Role Extraction.

Here is a link to the documentation on these configurations as well as much more information on the Watson Discovery service.

You will see that you might not have the ability to use the pre-made query of Keyword Extraction at first run in your data collection. This is shown below.

No three little dots in the right corner like the other containers have.

This is due to the need to configure your collection for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) configuration in order to use those enrichments.

Note: Any documents uploaded before a configuration is changed need to be re-uploaded in order to be processed by the new configuration.

These are the steps in order to be able to utilize those three other cognitive enrichments. You will make a custom configuration, and this is not hard.

Once you provision Watson Discovery in Bluemix, the link to Discovery will be in your Services section of your Bluemix Dashboard Console. Click on the Discovery service to get to this landing page for the service I show above.

This is the private data collection you click on to query the collection.

You will see this at the top left side of your page when upon opening the data collection. This is the Configuration drop-down you will need to modify.

This should say “Default Configuration” if this is your first time using Discovery. You will need to click on “Switch” and from here you can create your own configuration, which is pretty cool.

So please click on “Create a new configuration”.

Now you can select which enrichments you want to add to your query.

From here you can select which enrichments to add to your configuration for Watson Discovery queries.

Now go back to your landing page for your private data collection you have edited the configuration for in the past few steps.

Punch or click “Query this collection”.

We now see three little dots which is a drop-down for copying or editing this particular query.

You can learn more by looking through the documentation for more information about Watson Discovery service.

Watson Discovery documentation

Thank you, let me know if you have any questions! — Julia