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AN AI CAN NOW
READ AND ANSWER
QUESTIONS BASED
ON NEWS ARTICLES
In the future, you may
be able to chat with your
computer about the daily
news headlines, because
now, an AI is being taught
how to read, analyze and
answer questions about a
news article accurately.
One of Computer Science’s
goals is to be able to
create AI systems that can
learn humanity’s existing
information. According to
Chris Manning at Standford
University,
“Computers
don’t have the kind of
general knowledge and
Photo by: Makeuseof
28
JULY 2016
Future Cities & Robotics
common sense of how the
world works [from reading]
about things in novels or
watch[ing] sitcoms,”
Last
year,
Google’s
DeepMind team got a series
of articles from the Daily Mail
website and CNN to help
train an algorithm, so that
it can read and understand
short stories. The researchers
used the bulleted summaries
of the articles to create
short and simple questions
which trained the algorithm
to search for the article key
points.
Now, a group led by Manning
has designed an algorithm
that was able to beat
DeepMind’s results by 10
percent on the CNN articles
and 8 percent for Daily Mail
articles. Overall, it got a score
of 70 percent.
“Some of the stuff they
had just causes needless
complications. You get rid
of that and the numbers go
up.” Manning said.