Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd. "(hereafter "Ping An" or the "Group" or the "Company", HKEX: 2318; SSE: 601318)" has received global recognition for its achievements in artificial intelligence (AI) processing of human language in the healthcare field.

The 2019 MEDIQA challenge, sponsored by the international Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL), involved three tests. Ping An Smart City's Natural Language Processing team (PANLP) ranked first in Recognizing Question Entailment (RQE), and seconds in Natural Language Inference (NLI) and medical Question Answering (QA) respectively.

72 teams took part in the challenge, which aims to develop methods, techniques and gold standards for NLP in the medical domain.

"This outstanding achievement demonstrated the world-class healthcare Natural Language Processing technology capability of Ping An," said Dr. Xie Guotong, Chief Healthcare Scientist of Ping An Group. "Natural Language Processing is one of the most difficult challenges in AI. The MEDIQA challenge has increased the interest of many first-class universities and research institutions."

"Recognizing Question Entailment technology has been applied in Ping An'shealthcare AI services, such as AskBob, the medical search engine, available in more than 1000 medical organizations in China to provide critical clinical decision support services to enhance doctors' diagnosis and treatment decisions," added Dr. Ni Yuan, Head of PANLP. "The win reflects Ping An'sstrength in academic competition as well as advanced medical technology capabilities."

Ping An Group's medical healthcare AI covers more than 1,000 common diseases, and about 800 million potential patients benefit from it. The Group expects to invest RMB100 billion (USD15 billion) in technology research and development in the next decade to consolidate its technology leadership in the financial services industry.

NOTES TO EDITOR

The objective of RQE task is to identify entailment between two questions in the context of QA. The objective of NLI task is to identify three inference relations between two sentences: Entailment, Neutral and Contradiction. The objective of QA task is to filter and improve the ranking of automatically retrieved answers.

The evaluations for RQE and NLI tasks are based on Accuracy. The evaluation of QA task is based on the Accuracy, Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR), Precision, and Spearman's Rank Correlation Coefficient.

About Ping An

Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd. ("Ping An") is a world-leading technology-powered personal financial services group. With 184 million retail customers and 538 million Internet users, Ping An is one of the largest financial services companies in the world.

Ping An has two over-arching strategies 'pan financial assets' and 'pan healthcare', which focus on the provision of financial and healthcare services through our integrated financial services platform and our five ecosystems in financial services, healthcare, auto services, real estate services and Smart City services. Our 'finance + technology' and 'finance + ecosystems' strategies aim to provide customers and internet users with innovative and simple products and services. As China's first joint stock insurance company, Ping An Group is committed to upholding the highest standards of corporate reporting and corporate governance. The company is listed on the stock exchanges in Hong Kong, S.A.R., China and Shanghai.

Ping An ranked 7th in Forbes' 2019 Global 2000, and it ranked 29th in Fortune Magazine's 2018 Global 500 Leading Companies. Ping An also ranked 40th in 2018 WPP Millward Brown's BrandZ™ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands.