How do these services work, compsci-wise? Could someone link a few IBM publications explaining how the Question & Answer API works? That would be very helpful. The documentation pages explain nothing.
The research group within IBM that's working on the question and answer portion of Watson is called DeepQA. You can check out lots of information about the team, including publications, at http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_group_subpa...
Good suggestions. Most of these have published papers, we'll add that to the documentation soon. In the meantime you can read an overview of the Watson Jeopardy system here: http://www.aaai.org/Magazine/Watson/watson.php.