Back in January, we reported that Microsoft took the Stanford University Reading Comprehension test crown, being able to read documents and provide answers based on the content of the documents better than the average person.

Now Samsung Research has announced that the company has ranked first in two of the world’s top global artificial intelligence (AI) machine reading comprehension competitions.

Samsung Research won first place in the MAchine Reading COmprehension (MS MARCO) Competition held by Microsoft (MS), as well as showing the best performance in TriviaQA hosted by the University of Washington. The contests included distinguished universities around the world and other global AI firms.

In MS MARCO, ten web documents are presented for a certain query to let an AI algorithm create an optimum answer. Queries are randomly selected from a million queries from Bing (MS search engine) users. Answers are evaluated statistically by estimating how close they are with human answers. This is a test designed to apply an AI algorithm to solve real-world problems.

Samsung Research took part in the competitions with ConZNet, an AI algorithm developed by the company’s AI Center. ConZNet features skillful capabilities through adopting the Reinforcement Learning technique, which advances machine intelligence by giving reasonable feedback for outcomes, similar to a stick-and-carrot strategy in a learning process.

Samsung’s success in reading comprehension is not a one-off. The Beijing branch of Samsung Research won the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) hosted by the International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR) in March, putting them in a top-tier group for global computer vision tests. The ICDAR is the most influential competition in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technologies.

The technology may show up in Samsung products such as customer service soon.

“We are developing an AI algorithm to provide answers to user queries in a simpler and more convenient manner, for real life purposes,” said Jihie Kim, Head of Language Understanding Lab at Samsung Research. “Active discussion is underway in Samsung to adopt the ConZNet AI algorithm for products, services, customer response and technological development.”

Hopefully, at some point, this means that Bixby button on the latest Samsung flagship will feel less redundant.

Via Neowin.net