Research
When I was asked about my favorite movie in a game with friends after my wedding ceremony, I replied Star Wars. That was about two decades ago, and, yes, it’s still the case. I especially like Return of the Jedi. The third installment in the…
The cloud is an enormous success story. Microsoft Azure, the company’s cloud offering, was launched in 2010. It has grown by more than ten times in the past five years and is now operating in 54 regions around the world. Azure Chief Technology Officer, Mark…
Word embeddings have had a big impact on many applications in natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval. It is, therefore, crucial to open the blackbox and understand their meaning representation. We propose probing tasks for analyzing the meaning representation in word embeddings. Our tasks…
With the advent of AI assistants, initially developed for structured databases and manually curated knowledge graphs, answers to the types of basic fact-based questions people encounter during the course of regular conversation became keystrokes or a verbal cue away. What film won the Academy Award…
AI has made major strides in the last decade, from beating the world champion of Go, to learning how to program, to telling fantastical short stories. However, a basic human trait continues to elude machines: common sense. Common sense is a big term with…
Microsoft researchers are delving beyond the boundaries of information retrieval to optimize how we access and manage information in different areas. Not only are they advancing the realm most synonymous with information retrieval, search engines, but they are also researching new information access processes, utilizing…
Have you ever wondered what happens when you ask a search engine to search for something as seemingly simple as “how do you grill salmon”? Have you found yourself entering multiple searches before arriving at a webpage with a satisfying answer? Perhaps it was only…
Computers are disappearing. This doesn’t mean they’re actually going away, though. In fact, every day more and more of how we live, work, and interact is transformed by computers. But it does mean that technology has become so ubiquitous in recent years that our focus…
Significant advances are being made in artificial intelligence, but accessing and taking advantage of the machine learning systems making these developments possible can be challenging, especially for those with limited resources. These systems tend to be highly centralized, their predictions are often sold on a…
The rise of deep learning is accompanied by ever-increasing model complexity, larger datasets, and longer training times for models. When working on novel concepts, researchers often need to understand why training metrics are trending the way they are. So far, the available tools for machine…
Editor’s note: Since 2018, pre-training has without a doubt become one of the hottest research topics in Natural Language Processing (NLP). By leveraging generalized language models like the BERT, GPT and XLNet, great breakthroughs have been achieved in natural language understanding. However, in sequence to…
How do humans communicate efficiently? The common belief is that the words humans use to communicate – such as dog, for instance – invoke similar understanding of the physical concepts. Indeed, there exists a common conception about the physical appearance of a dog, the sounds…
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