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humans at reading
comprehension, but
they’ve still got a
ways to go
Researchers at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle. (Stuart Isett for The
Washington Post)
By Drew Harwell January 16
When computer models designed by tech giants Alibaba and Microsoft this
month surpassed humans for the first time in a reading-comprehension test,
both companies celebrated the success as a historic milestone.
But computers aren’t there yet — and aren’t even really that close, said AI
experts who reviewed the test results. Instead, the accomplishment highlights
not just how far the technology has progressed, but also how far it still has to
go.
“It’s a large step” for the companies’ marketing “but a small step for
humankind,” said Oren Etzioni, chief executive of the Allen Institute for
Artificial Intelligence, an AI research group funded by Microsoft co-founder
Paul Allen.
“These systems are brittle, in that small changes to paragraphs result in very
bad behavior” and misunderstandings, Etzioni said. And when it comes to, say,
drawing conclusions from two sentences or understanding implied ideas, the
models lag even further behind. “These kind of implications that we do
naturally, without even thinking about it, these systems don’t do,” he said.
But after dozens of following tests, researchers this month submitted proof
that their models had narrowly and finally beaten the humans — an 82.6 for
Microsoft Research Asia’s models, compared with the humans’ 82.3.
As both Microsoft and the Chinese tech powerhouse Alibaba claimed first-in-
AI victories, a flood of glowing media reports followed, positing that AI could
not just read better than humans but would also, as Luo Si said in a statement,
decrease “the need for human input in an unprecedented way.”
Microsoft said it is using similar models in its Bing search engine, and Alibaba
said its technology could be used for “customer service, museum tutorials and
online responses to medical inquiries.”
But AI experts say the test is far too limited to compare with real reading. The
answers aren’t generated from understanding the text, but from the system
finding patterns and matching terms in the same short passage. The test was
done only on cleanly formatted Wikipedia articles — not the wide-ranging
corpus of books, news articles and billboards that fill most humans’ waking
hours.
Adding gibberish into the passages, which a human would easily ignore,
tended to confuse the AI, making it spit out the wrong result. And every
passage was guaranteed to include the answer, preventing the models from
having to process concepts or reason with other ideas.
“The goal has always been to get to human-level performance, and it’s been
inching closer and closer there,” Rajpurkar said.
The real miracle of reading comprehension, AI experts said, is in reading
between the lines — connecting concepts, reasoning with ideas and
understanding implied messages that aren’t specifically outlined in the text.
But AI experts said people should not be concerned about losing their jobs to
machines that thoughtfully read passages about the rain — or anything else.
“When you read a passage, it doesn’t come out of the clear blue sky: It draws
on a lot of what you know about the world,” Davis said. “We really need to deal
much more deeply with the problem of extracting the meaning of a text in a
rich sense. That problem is still not solved.”