UKP-SQuARE: A Software Platform for Question Answering Research

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The number of use-cases that can be addressed by means of automatic question answering (QA) has exploded over the past years. End-to-end QA systems play a crucial role in enabling researchers to analyse the real-world performances of their models in these different scenarios. However, to date, QA systems and frameworks are limited to certain types of QA pipelines, and they are not reusable across diverse kinds of QA.In this project, we will address this issue by creating UKP-SQuARE, a reusable open-source QA platform that will allow researchers to seamlessly integrate novel approaches to different kinds of QA. UKP-SQuARE will include extensible components to retrieve web documents or knowledge-base information, a QA model repository to easily replace trained models during run-time, and a web-UI that can render explanations for model decisions. A QA skill system will finally enable researchers to integrate multiple interoperable approaches to different kinds of QA into one unified system. We will achieve this by consolidating the research prototypes from our DFG-funded project QA-EduInf for knowledge-base QA (KB-QA) and community-based QA (cQA). This will ensure the long-term preservation and the impact of our project results well beyond cQA and KB-QA.For the quality assurance of UKP-SQuARE, we will substantially involve the research community in the development process. We will moderate an open-source development community, provide detailed documentation and developer guides, and hold regular workshops with leading QA researchers. Furthermore, our public system demonstration will provide an extensive example of our platform in a real-world environment. Finally, we will integrate claim validation as a novel kind of QA in our platform to verify UKP-SQuARE’s extensibility, and its potential use in joint studies with other research fields such as social sciences.