How to Build an Open-Domain Question Answering System?

Lilian Weng · 5 years ago

The article reviews approaches for building open-domain question answering systems that can answer factual questions without relevant context provided. Key systems discussed include retriever-reader frameworks using classic IR (TF-IDF) or neural IR methods, with models like DrQA (2017) establishing Wikipedia as a standard knowledge source and top-k=5 document retrieval becoming common practice. The resulting systems enable applications like chatbots and AI assistants by decomposing QA into document retrieval and answer extraction stages.