News & features
Orca-Math: Demonstrating the potential of SLMs with model specialization
| Arindam Mitra, Hamed Khanpour, Corby Rosset, and Ahmed Awadallah
Microsoft’s Orca-Math, a specialized small language model, outperforms much larger models in solving math problems that require multi-step reasoning and shows the potential of using feedback to improve language models. Learn more.
AI Frontiers: The future of scale with Ahmed Awadallah and Ashley Llorens
| Ahmed Awadallah and Ashley Llorens
What’s the driving force behind AI’s recent, rapid progress? Research manager Ahmed Awadallah shares his insights on this, the two-stage approach to training large-scale models, and the need for better model evaluation in this episode of the #MSRPodcast.
AI Explainer: Foundation models and the next era of AI
| Ahmed Awadallah
The release of OpenAI’s GPT-4 is a significant advance that builds on several years of rapid innovation in foundation models. GPT-4, which was trained on the Microsoft Azure AI supercomputer, has exhibited significantly improved abilities across many dimensions—from summarizing lengthy…
You get what you measure: New NLU benchmarks for few-shot learning and robustness evaluation
| Jianfeng Gao and Ahmed Awadallah
Recent progress in natural language understanding (NLU) has been driven in part by the availability of large-scale benchmarks that provide an environment for researchers to test and measure the performance of AI models. Most of these benchmarks are designed for…
Conversations with data: Advancing the state of the art in language-driven data exploration
| Alex Polozov, Chris Meek, and Ahmed Awadallah
One key aspiration of AI is to develop natural and effective task-oriented conversational systems. Task-oriented conversational systems use a natural language interface to collaborate with and support people in accomplishing specific goals and activities. They go beyond chitchat conversation. For…
Awards | British Computer Society
Ahmed Awadallah awarded the 2020 Karen Sparck Jones Award
Ahmed Awadallah received the 2020 Karen Sparck Jones Award presented by the British Computer Society (BCS). This award is given to researchers within 10 years of their PhD who have contributed significantly to information retrieval and/or natural language processing.
In the news | TheNextWeb
Microsoft’s new AI can generate smart to-do lists from your emails
Researchers from the University of Washington and Microsoft’s AI team today unveiled a ‘Smart To-Do’ tool for automatically generating task lists from emails. Smart To-Do is an AI feature that scans your outgoing emails for actionable text and turns your…
In the news | VentureBeat
Microsoft claims its AI framework spots fake news better than state-of-the-art baselines
In a [study] published this week on the preprint server Arxiv.org, Microsoft and Arizona State University researchers propose an AI framework — Multiple sources of Weak Social Supervision (MWSS) — that leverages engagement and social media signals to detect fake news.…
SIGIR 2019 Conference: Research leads to more efficient information access, management, and retrieval
| Ryen W. White, Ahmed Awadallah, and Andrey Kolobov
Microsoft researchers are delving beyond the boundaries of information retrieval to optimize how we access and manage information in different areas. Not only are they advancing the realm most synonymous with information retrieval, search engines, but they are also researching…