Samsung ConZNet AI Bests All Competitors In Global Machine Reading Competitions
We already know that advanced artificial intelligence platforms can beat humans in games like chess and even Jeopardy, but what happens when you pit AI schemes against one another? In some cases, Samsung comes out on top. Samsung Research is currently celebrating that fact after it ranked first in two of the world's top global AI machine reading comprehension competitions.
One of those competitions was held by Microsoft. It's called the MAchine Reading COmprehension (MS MARCO) Competition, and Samsung Research took the top spot. It also showed the best performance in TrivaQA, competition hosted by the University of Washington. In both events, AI algorithms are tested in their ability to process natural language in human Q&As, and also being able to sift through written texts such as news articles.
"With intense competition in developing AI technologies globally, machine reading comprehension competitions such as MS MARCO are booming around the world. MS MARCO and TriviaQA are among the actively researched and used machine reading comprehension competitions along with SQuAD of Stanford University and NarrativeQA of DeepMind," Samsung said. "Distinguished universities around the world and global AI firms including Samsung are competing in these challenges."
Samsung participated in the competitions with ConZNet, an AI algorithm developed within the company's AI Center. It's trained with a Reinforcement Learning technique that Samsung likens to a "stick-and-carrot strategy in a learning process."
"We are developing an AI algorithm to provide answers to user queries in a simpler and more convenient manner, for real life purposes," said Jihie Kim, Head of Language Understanding Lab at Samsung Research. "Active discussion is underway in Samsung to adopt the ConZNet AI algorithm for products, services, customer response and technological development."
The competitions are fun and interesting, though there are real-world applications for this sort of thing. We saw a glimpse of it with Google's Duplex demonstration, in which a AI chat bot interacted with humans on the phone to set dinner reservations and book a hair styling appointment. Beyond that, this type of AI can have utility in help desk settings and guest service experiences.
