AI-900 Practice Test 21 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A developer uses Azure OpenAI Service to generate code snippets. They need the model to produce the most likely completion each time, with no randomness or creativity. Which parameter should they set?

Accepted Answer

temperature = 0. Setting temperature = 0 forces the model to always select the token with the highest probability at each step, eliminating randomness and ensuring deterministic, most-likely completions. This is ideal for tasks like code generation where consistency and predictability are required, as it disables the sampling randomness that higher temperature values introduce.

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temperature = 1

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top_p = 0.5

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frequency_penalty = 0.5

Question 2

A digital marketing agency wants to use an AI model that can create original images of products in different styles based on text prompts, such as 'a luxury watch in a futuristic setting.' Which Azure service should they choose?

Accepted Answer

Azure OpenAI Service. Azure OpenAI Service provides access to generative AI models like DALL-E, which can create original images from text prompts. This service is specifically designed for tasks such as generating product images in different styles based on descriptive text, making it the correct choice for the agency's requirement.

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Azure AI Language

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Azure Cognitive Search

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Azure Computer Vision

Question 3

A bank deploys an AI system that uses a deep neural network to approve personal loan applications. A customer whose loan was rejected requests a detailed explanation of why the decision was made. The bank's AI team realizes that the model's internal workings are too complex to provide a simple, understandable reason. According to Microsoft's responsible AI principles, which principle is most directly violated by this situation?

Accepted Answer

Transparency. The bank's inability to provide a clear, understandable explanation for the AI's loan decision directly violates the transparency principle. Microsoft's responsible AI principles require that AI systems be understandable and that their decisions can be explained to users, especially when those decisions have significant impact. A deep neural network's complex, non-linear decision boundaries and lack of inherent interpretability make it a 'black box,' which undermines the required transparency.

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Fairness

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Reliability & Safety

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Privacy & Security

Question 4

A data scientist trains a machine learning model on historical sales data to predict future sales volume. The model achieves 99% accuracy on the training dataset but only 75% accuracy on a separate test dataset. What is the most likely issue with this model?

Accepted Answer

Overfitting. The model's 99% accuracy on the training set versus 75% on the test set indicates it has memorized the training data, including noise and outliers, rather than learning generalizable patterns. This classic symptom of overfitting occurs when the model is too complex relative to the amount or variability of the training data, causing poor performance on unseen data.

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Underfitting

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High bias

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High variance

Question 5

What is 'abstractive summarisation' and how does it differ from 'extractive summarisation'?

Accepted Answer

Extractive selects key sentences verbatim; abstractive generates new sentences capturing the meaning. Extractive summarisation works by selecting and concatenating the most important sentences directly from the source text, while abstractive summarisation uses natural language generation (NLG) models to produce entirely new sentences that paraphrase and condense the core meaning. This distinction is fundamental in Azure AI Language's summarisation capabilities, where extractive returns verbatim excerpts and abstractive generates novel, coherent summaries.

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Extractive writes shorter summaries; abstractive writes longer ones

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Abstractive summarisation is only available for non-English languages

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Extractive summarisation uses generative AI; abstractive uses keyword ranking

Question 6

What does sentiment analysis do?

Accepted Answer

Determines the emotional tone (positive, negative, neutral) expressed in text. Sentiment analysis is a natural language processing (NLP) technique that evaluates text to determine the emotional tone expressed, typically classifying it as positive, negative, or neutral. In Azure Cognitive Services, this is performed by the Text Analytics API, which uses machine learning models to assign sentiment scores and labels based on the overall context of the input text. Option B is correct because it directly describes this core function of detecting emotional polarity.

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Translates text from one language to another

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Extracts key phrases and named entities from text

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Converts spoken words into written text

Question 7

Which Azure service enables building a question-answering chatbot from existing FAQ documents with minimal code?

Accepted Answer

Azure AI Language question answering + Azure Bot Service. Azure AI Language question answering (formerly QnA Maker) is specifically designed to extract question-answer pairs from semi-structured content like FAQ documents, PDFs, and URLs, and expose them via a REST API. Azure Bot Service provides the conversational interface and channel integration (e.g., Teams, Web Chat) with minimal code. Together, they enable a fully functional Q&A chatbot without custom NLP model training.

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Azure Machine Learning with custom NLP models

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Azure AI Speech with custom commands

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Azure Cognitive Search alone

Question 8

A law firm receives hundreds of legal documents daily. They want to use Azure AI Language to automatically assign each document to exactly one predefined category, such as 'Contract', 'Trademark', or 'Litigation'. Which Azure AI Language feature is specifically designed for this task?

Accepted Answer

Custom text classification (single-label). Custom text classification (single-label) is the correct feature because it allows you to train a model to assign each document to exactly one predefined category (e.g., 'Contract', 'Trademark', 'Litigation') based on your own labeled data. This is distinct from prebuilt features like NER or key phrase extraction, which do not perform document-level categorization into custom classes.

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Named Entity Recognition (NER)

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Key phrase extraction

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Conversational Language Understanding (CLU)

Question 9

A hospital wants to automatically anonymize patient medical records by removing all personally identifiable information (PII) such as names, dates, and social security numbers from unstructured text notes. Which Azure AI Language feature should they use?

Accepted Answer

Named entity recognition (NER). Named entity recognition (NER) is the correct Azure AI Language feature because it is specifically designed to identify and categorize entities in unstructured text, including PII categories such as names, dates, and social security numbers. The hospital can use NER's pre-built PII detection model to automatically locate and redact these sensitive elements from patient notes, meeting their anonymization requirement.

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Key phrase extraction

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Sentiment analysis

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Language detection

Question 10

A data science team trains a regression model to predict house prices. They evaluate the model using Mean Absolute Error (MAE). After deployment, they notice that the model occasionally produces large errors (e.g., underpredicting a luxury home by $500,000) while most predictions are within $20,000. The business is more concerned about the impact of these large errors than the average small error. Which additional metric should the team use to better capture the penalty for large errors?

Accepted Answer

Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE). Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) is the correct additional metric because it squares the residuals before averaging, which heavily penalizes large errors like the $500,000 underprediction. Unlike MAE, which treats all errors equally, RMSE amplifies the impact of outliers, making it a better fit for a business that cares more about catastrophic failures than typical small errors. This aligns with the need to capture the penalty for large deviations in regression model evaluation.

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R-squared

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Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE)

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F1 score

Question 11

What is 'chain of thought' prompting in generative AI?

Accepted Answer

A prompting technique that elicits step-by-step reasoning to improve accuracy on complex tasks. Chain of thought prompting is a technique where the model is asked to produce intermediate reasoning steps before arriving at a final answer, which significantly improves performance on multi-step arithmetic, logic, and common-sense reasoning tasks. Unlike a simple answer request, it forces the model to externalize its reasoning process, reducing errors from shortcut or pattern-matching behaviors. This is a prompting strategy, not a model architecture change, and is particularly effective in large language models like GPT-4 or Azure OpenAI's GPT-3.5 Turbo.

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Connecting multiple AI models in a processing pipeline

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Linking multiple conversation turns to maintain context

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Training a model using sequential text data only

Question 12

What is 'image captioning' in Azure AI Vision and how is it different from image tagging?

Accepted Answer

Captioning generates a natural language sentence describing the scene; tagging returns individual concept keywords. Image captioning in Azure AI Vision uses a deep learning model to analyze the entire scene and generate a coherent, natural language sentence describing the image content, such as 'a group of people playing soccer in a park.' In contrast, image tagging returns a list of individual keywords or concepts (e.g., 'soccer,' 'grass,' 'people') without forming a complete sentence. This distinction is fundamental to understanding the different outputs of these two Azure AI Vision features.

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Captioning adds user-written descriptions; tagging uses AI to detect objects automatically

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Captioning works on video; tagging works only on still images

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Image tagging is more accurate than captioning because it uses simpler classification

Question 13

What does 'AI-powered search' mean and how does it differ from traditional keyword search?

Accepted Answer

Understanding query meaning and intent to return relevant results beyond exact keyword matching. AI-powered search uses natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning models to interpret the user's intent and the semantic meaning of a query, rather than relying solely on exact keyword matches. This allows the search engine to return relevant results even when the query uses synonyms, paraphrases, or natural language phrasing. In contrast, traditional keyword search only matches documents containing the exact words or phrases from the query, often missing context or user intent.

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Using AI to speed up the indexing of documents in a search engine

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Automatically correcting user spelling mistakes before processing search queries

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Personalising search results for each user based on their browsing history

Question 14

A marketing team needs to analyze thousands of product reviews to identify the most frequently mentioned topics, such as 'battery life', 'customer support', and 'price'. They want an automated method to extract these main concepts from each review. Which Azure AI Language feature should they use?

Accepted Answer

Key phrase extraction. Key phrase extraction is the correct choice because it automatically identifies the main concepts, such as 'battery life', 'customer support', and 'price', from unstructured text like product reviews. This feature is specifically designed to extract the most salient topics or points from a document, making it ideal for analyzing thousands of reviews to find frequently mentioned themes.

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Language detection

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Sentiment analysis

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Entity recognition

Question 15

A company plans to use an AI system to analyze employee email communications to identify patterns and improve productivity. The company is concerned about respecting employee boundaries and legal regulations. Which Microsoft responsible AI principle is most important to consider?

Accepted Answer

Privacy and security – protecting employees' personal data and email content.. The scenario involves analyzing employee email communications, which inherently includes sensitive personal data and private correspondence. Microsoft's 'Privacy and security' principle is the most relevant because it mandates that AI systems protect individuals' data and respect boundaries, ensuring compliance with regulations like GDPR and internal privacy policies. Without strong privacy and security safeguards, analyzing email content could violate employee trust and legal requirements, regardless of how fair, reliable, or inclusive the system is.

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Fairness – ensuring the system treats all employees equally.

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Reliability and safety – ensuring the system functions correctly.

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Inclusiveness – ensuring the system works for all employees regardless of communication style.