Alibaba neural network defeats human in global reading test
This is not quite human-level question-answering in the everyday sense of those words. The ZDNet headline is too clickbaity for my taste.<p>The answer to every question in the test is a preexisting snippet of text, or "span," from a corresponding reading passage shown to the model. The model has only to select which span in the reading passage gives the best answer -- i.e., which sequence of words already in the text best answers the question.[a]<p>Actual current results:<p><a href="https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD-explorer/" rel="nofollow">https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD-explorer/</a><p>Paper describing the dataset and test:<p><a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.05250" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.05250</a><p>[a] If this explanation isn't entirely clear to you, it might help to think of the problem as a challenging classification task in which the number of possible classes for each question is equal to the number of possible spans in the corresponding reading passage.