Open Domain Question Answering Skill on Wikipedia

Task definition

Open Domain Question Answering (ODQA) is a task to find an exact answer to any question in Wikipedia articles. Thus, given only a question, the system outputs the best answer it can find. The default ODQA implementation takes a batch of queries as input and returns 5 answers sorted via their score.

Quick Start

Before using the model make sure that all required packages are installed running the command:

python -m deeppavlov install en_odqa_infer_wiki

Training (if you have your own data)

from deeppavlov import configs
from deeppavlov.core.commands.train import train_evaluate_model_from_config

train_evaluate_model_from_config(configs.doc_retrieval.en_ranker_tfidf_wiki, download=True)
train_evaluate_model_from_config(configs.squad.multi_squad_noans, download=True)

Building

from deeppavlov import configs
from deeppavlov.core.commands.infer import build_model

odqa = build_model(configs.odqa.en_odqa_infer_wiki, load_trained=True)

Inference

result = odqa(['What is the name of Darth Vader\'s son?'])
print(result)

Output:

>> Luke Skywalker

Languages

There are pretrained ODQA models for English and Russian languages in DeepPavlov.

Models

The architecture of ODQA skill is modular and consists of two models, a ranker and a reader. The ranker is based on DrQA [1] proposed by Facebook Research and the reader is based on R-NET [2] proposed by Microsoft Research Asia and its implementation [3] by Wenxuan Zhou.

Running ODQA

Note

About 24 GB of RAM required. It is possible to run on a 16 GB machine, but than swap size should be at least 8 GB.

Training

ODQA ranker and ODQA reader should be trained separately. Read about training the ranker here. Read about training the reader in our separate reader tutorial.

Interacting

When interacting, the ODQA skill returns a plain answer to the user’s question.

Run the following to interact with English ODQA:

python -m deeppavlov interact en_odqa_infer_wiki -d

Run the following to interact with Russian ODQA:

python -m deeppavlov interact ru_odqa_infer_wiki -d

Configuration

The ODQA configs suit only model inferring purposes. For training purposes use the ranker configs and the reader configs accordingly.

Comparison

Scores for ODQA skill:

Model Dataset enwiki (2018-02-11) enwiki (2016-12-21)
F1 EM F1 EM
DeepPavlov SQuAD (dev) 35.89 29.21 37.83 31.26
DrQA [1] - - - 27.1
R3 [4] - - 37.5 29.1

EM stands for “exact-match accuracy”. Metrics are counted for top 5 documents returned by retrieval module.