[viksit]

Just FYI the frames dataset hasn't been available for download since the day they "released" it (although the QA dataset has been). If it is - someone do let me know :)

"Frame tracking" and adaptive slot filling without pre-canning is actually a very active area of research - the goal is to provide not just an Eliza style infinite conversational ability, but to be able to reason about and get the user to a specific outcome in a real world use case by prompting them for information in a semi supervised manner.

Being able to do it via a series of differentiable (calculus wise) functions is a fundamental improvement in achieving convergence between statistical systems and logical reasoning (which harks back to "classical" AI problems such as planning). Microsoft has some very interesting research here and papers like these [1][2]. Maluuba has some good stuff here as well. [3][4]

I doubt the company was acquired for their datasets. They've been a well respected AI company with some top notch researchers, and I think their area of research gels well with MSR's own NLP research.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.01269

[2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/unsuper...

[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.02605

[4] https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.05151