Samsung Wins at Two Top Global AI Machine Reading Comprehension Challenges

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has played a prominent role in advancing the world’s greatest innovations, giving way for many technologies to assist us in much of our day-to-day lives. The introduction of AI brings about the idea of an error-free world, providing a glimpse of what it looks like to reduce human effort while producing quick and accurate results.

Samsung Research, the advanced Research & Development (R&D) hub of Samsung Electronics, has recognised the potential in AI, and has dedicated substantial effort in creating ground-breaking AI technologies that could one day change the world for the better. And it has succeeded, as proven by its recent success at two of the world’s top global AI machine reading comprehension competitions, MAchine Reading COmprehension (MS MARCO by MS Microsoft) and TriviaQA (hosted by the University of Washington).

“Artificial Intelligence is the way forward and the future of how we experience the world. Our R&D team has done truly outstanding work in the development of its AI technologies, as proven when Samsung Research was ranked first in the MS MARCO competition and won ‘Best Performance’ in TriviaQA. Although there is still much to be researched and developed, this is the right step forward toward creating an efficient world assisted by smart AI,” said Yoonsoo Kim, President of Samsung Malaysia Electronics.

MS MARCO and TriviaQA are among the most actively researched and used machine reading comprehension competitions in the world. In these competitions, AI algorithms are tested in their capabilities of processing natural language in human question and answers, while also providing written text in various types of documents such as news articles and blog posts.

Samsung Research was able to excel in these competitions which required particularly high levels of technical expertise, thanks to its ConZNet algorithm. This algorithm advances machine intelligence by giving reasonable feedback for outcomes, similar to a stick-and-carrot (or reinforcement) strategy in the learning process. ConZNet takes natural language into account such as how people deliver queries and answers online which was the key factor in determining the winners of these competitions.

With this, there is very high potential in introducing Samsung Research’s AI algorithm to other departments in Samsung Electronics such as Home Appliances and Smartphones.  Apart from that, departments dealing with customer services are also showing high interest in the AI, especially since AI-based customer services like chatbots have emerged as hot topics in recent times.

“There are limitless opportunities in the areas of AI, and through that, we have the potential to build a knowledge system about connections between machines, applications, and customer demands in the Internet of Things. We are always looking for ways to allow our consumers to do and achieve the most in their daily lives, and we believe that this is a huge stepping stone towards that,” President Kim added.

“Furthermore, Samsung Electronics has recently begun launching global AI Centers where we will be working closely with leading AI experts. Eventually, we hope that our technologies developed at Samsung Research will be naturally adopted by other Samsung Electronics products and services,” he concluded.

Competitions such as MS MARCO and TriviaQA allow contestants to participate at any time, and rankings are altered according to real-time test results.

For more information, kindly visit the Samsung Malaysia Newsroom at https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-electronics-wins-at-two-top-global-ai-machine-reading-comprehension-challenges and https://news.samsung.com/global/interview-with-samsungs-unique-strengths-we-are-developing-a-user-oriented-ai-algorithm.