Microsoft researchers have created technology that uses artificial intelligence to read a document and answer questions about it about as well as a human. It's a major milestone in the push to have search engines such as Bing and intelligent assistants such as Cortana interact with people and provide information in more natural ways, much like people communicate with each other. A team at Microsoft Research Asia reached the human parity milestone using the Stanford Question Answering Dataset, known among researchers as SQuAD. It's a machine reading comprehension dataset that is made up of questions about a set of Wikipedia articles. According to the SQuAD leaderboard, on Jan. 3, Microsoft submitted a model that reached the score of 82.650 on the exact match portion.

Microsoft researchers have created technology that uses artificial intelligence to read a document and answer questions about it about as well as a human. It's a major milestone in the push to have search engines such as Bing and intelligent assistants such as Cortana interact with people and provide information in more natural ways, much...