Deep neural network models score higher than humans in reading and comprehension test

(credit: Alibaba Group)

Microsoft has developed a deep neural network that scored higher than humans on exact scores in a Stanford University reading and comprehension test Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD).

Microsoft achieved 82.650 on Jan. 3; Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. came in at second place at 82.440 on Jan. 5. The best human score so far is 82.304.

“SQuAD is a new reading comprehension dataset, consisting of questions posed by crowdworkers on a set of Wikipedia articles, where the answer to every question is a segment of text, or span, from the corresponding reading passage,” according to the Stanford NLP Group. “With 100,000+ question-answer pairs on 500+ articles, SQuAD is significantly larger than previous reading comprehension datasets.”

“The Chinese e-commerce titan has joined the likes of Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Baidu Inc. in a race to develop AI that can enrich social media feeds, target ads and services or even aid in autonomous driving, Bloomberg notes. “Beijing has endorsed the technology in a national-level plan that calls for the country to become the industry leader 2030.”