Microsoft creates new tool to find information within a document quickly

Microsoft’s Montreal research lab says that it has developed a software solution that can find answers for an inquiry directly from a specialized document like a guidebook.

In other words, there is no need to scroll tediously through a sea of content to find a simple question.

By enlisting the help of a technology called machine reading comprehension(MRC), Microsoft says it can provide a robust and intuitive question and answer (Q&A) service. It also doesn’t need things like curated databases and graphs to function.

To illustrate, Microsoft created an interactive demo that can pull answers from Welcome to Canada 一 the Canadian government’s guidebook for new immigrants and visitors.

To take advantage of the platform, users only have to enter their question into a search box. The platform will then come back with answers ranked in three levels of confidence: High(green), medium(yellow), and low(red).

Microsoft says its search engine Bing also uses MRC technology to handle an unspecified selection of queries.

On top of that, the company says it’s contemplating under-the-hood improvements for Bing that allow it to answer domain- and enterprise-specific queries.

Source: Microsoft