What language model is Azure Question Answering using?

Question

Hi,
I want to understand how Question Answering works in more detail. In this post https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/ai-cognitive-services-blog/qna-maker-is-being-retired-hello-question-answering/bc-p/3753638#M396 from May 30 2022, the writer states "Powered by state-of-the-art transformer models and Turing natural language model, Question Answering is Microsoft Azure’s latest intelligent Q&A offering with marked improvements in relevance and quality over QnA Maker". Does this mean that Question Answering uses T-ULRv5 (or maybe T-ULRv6) https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/microsoft-turing-universal-language-representation-model-t-ulrv5-tops-xtreme-leaderboard-and-trains-100x-faster/ as it is underlying language model which is fine-tuned to answer the custom questions which is put as Sources of the Question Answering resource?
If there are any other blog posts, research papers, etc., which talk about this topic, please link them.
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Hello Daniel Hjelm

Thanks for your follow up. Just got the confirmation today and the model we are using is Turing NLP models. Product team can not provide more details about what model is using for which feature exactly since it is confidential, but there is a website talking about those models, you may be interested in -

https://turing.microsoft.com/

It does mention T-ULRv6 is the latest version of the model -

And also there are pages you may want to take a look at -

Introduce for Turing Bletchley

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/turing-bletchley-a-universal-image-language-representation-model-by-microsoft/

One informatic page -

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/using-deepspeed-and-megatron-to-train-megatron-turing-nlg-530b-the-worlds-largest-and-most-powerful-generative-language-model/

I am sorry due to the confidential policy we can not share a lot, I hope above website and pages help.

Regards,

Yutong

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