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.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]Actual current results:https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD-explorer/Paper describing the dataset and test:https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.05250[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.