A three-minute guide to how machine reading could make your job easier

Most of the world’s information is written down – in books, on the web or in the cloud – and yet machines today aren’t able to read and understand that knowledge nearly as well as people can. With machine reading comprehension, researchers say machines would be able to quickly parse through all that information, reason over it and provide people with the information they need most.

The latest in our Explanimators series explores the world of machine reading – teaching computers to read and comprehend natural, written language with help from artificial intelligence algorithms and cloud computing.

Machine reading comprehension systems could help people more easily find the information they need in car manuals or dense tax code documents. They could let doctors, lawyers and other experts get through the documents for specific medical findings or rarified legal precedent. That would leave experts more time to focus on treating patients or formulating legal defenses.

“We’re trying to develop what we call a literate machine: A machine that can read text, understand text and then learn how to communicate, whether it’s written or orally,” said Kaheer Suleman, the co-founder of Maluuba, a Montreal-based deep learning startup acquired by Microsoft earlier this year.