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Microsoft adds enhancements to its Computational Network Toolkit

Microsoft is adding language enhancements, an expanded toolbox, and improved readers for text and speech to its open source Computational Network Toolkit (CNTK), a tool used to speed up advances in artificial intelligence.

CNTK 1.5 introduces a new parallelism technique known as Block Momentum, that takes training scalability to a new level of performance, while still preserving accuracy, says Chris Basoglu, Partner Engineering Manager, Microsoft Technology and Research.

Additionally, CNTK 1.5 includes a revamped I/O architecture, including more flexible readers for text and speech, says Mr. Basoglu. Microsoft has also included a library of standard components, such as Sequence-to-Sequence with Attention and Deep Residual Nets for Image Recognition.

The CNTK can be downloaded from GitHub.

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