Microsoft AI tech can read documents, answer questions

San Francisco: Microsoft researchers have created a technology that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to read a document and answer questions about it about as well as a human.

"It's a major milestone in the push to have search engines such as Bing and intelligent assistants such as Cortana interact with people and provide information in more natural ways, much like people communicate with each other," Allison Linn, senior writer at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post on Tuesday.

The team at Microsoft Research Asia reached the human parity milestone using the "Stanford Question Answering Dataset", known among researchers as "SQuAD".

It's a machine reading comprehension dataset that is made up of questions about a set of Wikipedia articles.

According to the SQuAD leaderboard, Microsoft submitted a model that reached the score of 82.650 on the exact match portion. The human performance on the same set of questions and answers is 82.304.

On January 5, researchers with the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba submitted a score of 82.440, also about the same as a human. "The two companies are currently tied for first place on the SQuAD 'leaderboard' which lists the results of research organisations' efforts," the post read.