Google starts using MUM: here how it helped the searches about vaccines
A thousand times more powerful than BERT and capable of multitasking to connect information for users in new ways: since the presentation at the last Google I/O, Google MUM has been described with sensational tones, which helped raise expectations about the Multitask Unified Model technology (nicely called MUM). According to the first tests, this hype is perfectly justified, and the concrete results of MUM’s applications to Research already are outstanding.
Google MUM applied to Search: first results
This is what Pandu Nayak, Google Fellow and Vice President of Search, says in an article on the company blog in which he describes how MUM has improved Google searches for information on anti-Covid vaccines.
The starting problem is easy to understand: in the different languages there are over 800 variants of vaccine names – Astrazeneca, Coronavac, Moderna, Pfizer, Sputnik and other widely distributed vaccines all have in fact “many different names around the world” – and so people who google information about vaccines can use several queries, such as “Coronavaccin Pfizer”, “mrna-1273”, “Covaccine” and so on, with a list that could go on almost indefinitely.
For Google it is crucial “to correctly identify all these names to provide people with the latest reliable information about the vaccine”, but to be able to identify the different ways in which people refer to vaccines around the world “takes a lot of time and hundreds of hours in human resources”.