Microsoft Maluuba is teaching machines to ask questions

It's no secret that today's conversational assistants leave a lot to be desired. We spend a lot of time talking about how bad they are at hearing what we say and even worse at interpreting it. But one thing that doesn't get nearly enough attention is the one-directional nature of conversations we have with Siri, Cortana and the rest. These systems don't know how to ask questions -- real inquiries that reflect a nuanced understanding of what information is known and what information is desired. Microsoft Maluuba, the research team of PhDs that Microsoft acquired back in January, has been hard at work exploring the nexus of machine learning and question generation with the aim of delivering an intelligent personal assistant that surpasses the limited capabilities of today's market leaders. In a recent paper, the team outlined its approach of using recurrent networks to generate questions from a body of text.