“I think it's certainly a step forward,” says Richard Socher, cofounder of an AI company called MetaMind, which is also working on language processing. Maluuba, started by several graduates of the University of Waterloo in 2010, previously developed an intelligent personal assistant for smartphones, and it has focused its research on natural-language processing or machine comprehension. A fundamental challenge with language is that the words used to represent different concepts are arbitrary, so it is more difficult to draw connections between them than it is for images. Indeed, the amount of text required to make deep learning work has often been held up as one of its key limiting factors (see “ Can This Man Make AI More Human?”). The kind of machine-learning approach employed by the Maluuba researchers normally requires huge swaths of text in order to learn. Researchers are making progress largely by tweaking and improving key machine-learning techniques and feeding computers large quantities of annotated text. Google DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet that is focused on AI research, is doing similar work, training deep-learning systems to read summaries of news articles (see “ Google DeepMind Teaches Artificial Intelligence Machines to Read”).Īs yet, however, there have been no grand breakthroughs, and it’s unclear how hard it may be to equip machines with sophisticated reading comprehension skills. Facebook is gathering conversational data through an assistant service called M in an effort to train its algorithms to converse naturally (see “ Teaching Machines to Understand Us”).

But comprehending text is one of the biggest challenges in artificial intelligence computers are usually tripped up by the fact that language requires a deep understanding of the way the real world works.ĭespite the challenges, some of the biggest tech companies are trying to develop AIs that can comprehend text. It could open up powerful new ways to interact with computers and mine information.

The idea of teaching machines to read and communicate effectively using language is certainly tantalizing.

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