Microsoft Research Blog

Conversations with data: Advancing the state of the art in language-driven data exploration 

May 3, 2021 | Alex Polozov, Chris Meek, and Ahmed Awadallah
One key aspiration of AI is to develop natural and effective task-oriented conversational systems. Task-oriented conversational systems use a natural language interface to collaborate with and support people in accomplishing specific goals and activities. They go beyond chitchat conversation. For example, as personal digital assistants,…
An example of a multi-turn text-to-SQL task. The user query “Find the names of the top 3 highest sales books” corresponds to the formal program “SELECT title FROM book ORDER BY sale_amount DESC LIMIT 3”. The follow-up user query, “Who are their authors,” corresponds to the formal program “SELECT t1.title, t1.name FROM author AS t1 JOIN book AS t2 ON t1.id = t2.author_id ORDER BY t2.sale_amount DESC LIMIT 3”. In the corresponding database, there is an “Author” table with an “id” column, a “name” column, a “country” column, and an ellipsis signifying additional columns; a “Press” table with an “id” column, a “name” column, an “address” column, and an ellipsis signifying additional columns; and a “Book” table with an “id” column, a “title” column, an “author id” column, a “sale_amount” column, and an ellipsis signifying additional columns.

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  3. Figure 2: A flowchart depicting unstructured text being processed though a query engine, a probabilistic parser, and probabilistic clustering to produce a unified knowledge base

    Alexandria in Microsoft Viva Topics: from big data to big knowledge 

    April 26, 2021

    Project Alexandria is a research project within Microsoft Research Cambridge dedicated to discovering entities, or topics of information, and their associated properties from unstructured documents. This research lab has studied knowledge mining research for over a decade, using the probabilistic programming framework Infer.NET. Project Alexandria…

  5. A circular flow chart of the QL framework. At the top is a rectangle labeled “QL Scheduling Strategy” with the word “Agent” in parenthesis, representing that the strategy is mapped to an RL agent. From the rectangle, an arrow points around to a rectangle below it that contains a input state space. The rectangle is labeled “Program under test” with the word “Environment” in parenthesis, representing that the program is mapped to the unknown environment. The arrow is labeled “Next op,” and alongside it are the Softmax selection function and the value update formula.

    Reinforcing program correctness with reinforcement learning 

    April 14, 2021 | Suvam Mukherjee

    Many of our online activities, from receiving and sending emails to searching for information to streaming movies, are driven behind the scenes by cloud-based distributed architectures. Writing concurrent software—programs with multiple logical threads of execution—is of paramount importance to scale to these growing computing needs.…

  10. graphical user interface, text, application, email

    The science behind semantic search: How AI from Bing is powering Azure Cognitive Search 

    March 2, 2021

    Azure Cognitive Search (opens in new tab) is a cloud search service that gives developers APIs and tools to build rich search experiences over private, heterogeneous content in web, mobile, and enterprise applications. It has multiple components, including an API for indexing and querying, seamless integration through Azure data ingestion, deep integration with Azure Cognitive Services, and persistent storage…

  12. hexagonal AI icons on a blue background

    AAAI 2021: Accelerating the impact of artificial intelligence 

    February 24, 2021

    The purpose of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, according to its bylaws, is twofold. The first is to promote research in the area of AI, and the second is to promote the responsible use of these types of technology. The result was a 35th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-21) (opens in new tab) schedule that broadens the…

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