Microsoft is teaching systems to read, answer and even ask questions - The AI Blog

Microsoft researchers have already created technology that can do two difficult tasks about as well as a person: identify images and recognize words in a conversation. Now, the company's leading AI experts are working on systems that can do something even more complex: Read passages of text and answer questions about them. "We're trying to develop what we call a literate machine: A machine that can read text, understand text and then learn how to communicate, whether it's written or orally," said Kaheer Suleman, the co-founder of Maluuba, a Quebec-based deep learning startup that Microsoft acquired earlier this year. The Maluuba team is one of several groups at Microsoft that are tackling the challenge of machine reading. Two other research teams, one at the company's Redmond, Washington, headquarters and the other in its Beijing, China, research lab, are currently leading a competition run by Stanford University that uses information from Wikipedia to test how well AI systems can answer questions about text passages.