Yes, and it was a real research collaboration - a brilliant insight - to see that the Jeopardy language was constrained and tractable to analysis that would allow a mapping to a solver.

I have not been involved in these efforts or the community closely enough to say, but I think that things like controlled english

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempto_Controlled_English

and

http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~soar/sitemaker/docs/pubs/Interact...

may have been inspired by the success of Watson in Jeopardy.

On the other hand I was running a question answering question when Watson started, and the PI said to me "oh yeah, but that's cheating..."

And on the third hand we stopped and closed that project pretty well six months later.

So - there's a lot to think about!