Machine Reading Using Neural Machines

  • Lucy Vanderwende; Percy Liang; Jianfeng Gao; Rangan Majumder; Isabelle Augenstein | Microsoft; Stanford University; Microsoft; Microsoft; University College London

Teaching machines to read, process and comprehend natural language documents and images is a coveted goal in modern AI. We see growing interest in machine reading comprehension (MRC) due to potential industrial applications as well as technological advances, especially in deep learning and the availability of various MRC datasets that can benchmark different MRC systems. Despite the progress, many fundamental questions remain unanswered: Is question answer (QA) the proper task to test whether a machine can read? What is the right QA dataset to evaluate the reading capability of a machine? For speech recognition, the switchboard dataset was a research goal for 20 years – why is there such a proliferation of datasets for machine reading? How important is model interpretability and how can it be measured? This session will bring together experts at the intersection of deep learning and natural language processing to explore these topics.

Series: Microsoft Research Faculty Summit