Alibaba neural network defeats human in global reading test ZDNet

Alibaba says its deep neural network model has outscored humans in a global reading test, paving the way for the underlying technology to reduce the need for human input. The Chinese tech giant's research unit, Institute of Data Science of Technologies (IDST), said it had developed a deep-learning model that attained a score of 82.44 in Exact Match on the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (Squad). Humans had clocked a previous score of 82.304, it said. Squad comprised more than 100,000 question-and-answer sets based on more than 500 Wikipedia articles, in which participants were required to build machine-learning models to respond to the questions. These models would be evaluated by Squad, which then would run the model on the test set.