Microsoft researchers leading the race to kill the search engine - MSPoweruser

Microsoft is currently topping the leaderboard in the race to develop Machine Reading – the ability for computers to read arbitrary text and extract meaning from it sufficient to answer questions regarding the content. "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. Microsoft's teams are currently on top of the SQuAD leaderboard, which pits academic teams against each other to develop technology to read information from Wikipedia to test how well AI systems can answer questions about text passages. Microsoft researchers and other industry and academic experts also are competing for the best results using another dataset, called MS MARCO, that uses real, anonymized data from Bing search queries to test a system's ability to answer real questions from real users. "We're not just going to build a bunch of algorithms to solve theoretical problems. We're using them to solve real problems and testing them on real data," said Rangan Majumder, a partner group program manager within Microsoft's Bing division.