I'd be curious to know more about how the system works, and how they trained it and/or curated the knowledge base it worked from. Maybe they'll write a more informative paper or something. But as it is, this wasn't a particularly surprising or impressive technology demo.
I love these types of statements. Five years ago most experts in information retrieval would have said that this is nearly AI-Complete.
And its hilarious that the same people who will say stuff like this (although maybe not you Pooter) will send me five emails about how incredible it is that the iPad is getting a front-facing camera.
People don't seem to really have a clue as to what is actually difficult or interesting from a CS perspective.
Pardon me, but I do have a clue as to what's actually interesting and/or difficult from a CS perspective. I work in NLP research, and I'm actually familiar with other research systems being developed IBM, as well as other organizations.
I wasn't particularly impressed or surprised.