{"id":5318,"date":"2017-05-10T19:08:50","date_gmt":"2017-05-10T19:08:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/microsoft-maluuba-is-teaching-machines-to-ask-questions.html"},"modified":"2017-05-10T19:08:50","modified_gmt":"2017-05-10T19:08:50","slug":"microsoft-maluuba-is-teaching-machines-to-ask-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rbsitsoftwaresolution.in\/blog\/microsoft-maluuba-is-teaching-machines-to-ask-questions.html","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft Maluuba\u00a0is teaching machines to ask questions"},"content":{"rendered":"


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It\u2019s no secret that today\u2019s conversational assistants\u00a0leave a lot to be desired. We spend a lot of time talking about how bad they are at hearing\u00a0what we say and even worse at interpreting it. But one thing that doesn\u2019t get nearly enough attention is the one-directional nature of conversations we have with Siri, Cortana and the rest. These systems don\u2019t know how to ask questions \u2014 real inquiries that reflect a nuanced understanding of what information is known and what information is\u00a0desired.<\/p>\n

Microsoft Maluuba, the research team of PhDs that Microsoft acquired back in January,\u00a0<\/a>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\u2019s market leaders. In a recent paper,<\/a> the team outlined its approach of using recurrent networks to generate questions from a body of text.<\/p>\n

The team expanded\u00a0upon existing\u00a0question generators by\u00a0combining supervised learning with reinforcement learning. Reinforcement learning makes use of the economic concept of utility to assign \u201cpoints\u201d for performing what are deemed to be optimal actions. The model is built to maximize this value and over many iterations it\u00a0improves by continuously adjusting its strategy.<\/p>\n

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The Maluuba team prioritized accuracy and grammar. The aim is to be able to generate questions in proper English and to be able to generate questions that can be answered within the confines of the source text.\u00a0Measuring the quality of a generated question based on how accurately a machine learning model can answer it is an interesting proposition.<\/p>\n

If\u00a0the model was generating questions based on this story, it would be reasonable to ask what company authored\u00a0the research we are discussing. It would not be reasonable to ask a generic question about why the team used\u00a0a recurrent network or to ask \u201cteam recurrent net not use?\u201d<\/p>\n

The team explained to me that the ability to ask questions improves the ability to answer them. This is because questions typically have only a single answer but it is possible to ask multiple questions that all lead to the same answer.<\/p>\n

In practice, Maluuba\u2019s question generator could be turned into a rather meta system for training other machine learning models by intentionally collecting new information. More concretely, question generation also has obvious uses in education \u2014 automatically generating questions for students to answer based on course material.<\/p>\n

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Featured Image: RICHARD HUTCHINGS\/Getty Images<\/small><\/p>\n

Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunchIt\/~3\/N2HPRweIlzE\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s no secret that today\u2019s conversational assistants\u00a0leave a lot to be desired. We spend a lot of time talking about how bad they are at hearing\u00a0what we say and even <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[19],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-5318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-enterprise-software","tag-enterprise"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t