On the portability of extractive Question-Answering systems on scientific papers to real-life application scenarios

Chyrine Tahri, Xavier Tannier, Patrick Haouat


Abstract
There are still hurdles standing in the way of faster and more efficient knowledge consumption in industrial environments seeking to foster innovation. In this work, we address the portability of extractive Question Answering systems from academic spheres to industries basing their decisions on thorough scientific papers analysis. Keeping in mind that such industrial contexts often lack high-quality data to develop their own QA systems, we illustrate the misalignment between application requirements and cost sensitivity of such industries and some widespread practices tackling the domain-adaptation problem in the academic world. Through a series of extractive QA experiments on QASPER, we adopt the pipeline-based retriever-ranker-reader architecture for answering a question on a scientific paper and show the impact of modeling choices in different stages on the quality of answer prediction. We thus provide a characterization of practical aspects of real-life application scenarios and notice that appropriate trade-offs can be efficient and add value in those industrial environments.
Anthology ID:
2022.wiesp-1.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the first Workshop on Information Extraction from Scientific Publications
Month:
November
Year:
2022
Address:
Online
Venue:
WIESP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
67–77
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.wiesp-1.8
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chyrine Tahri, Xavier Tannier, and Patrick Haouat. 2022. On the portability of extractive Question-Answering systems on scientific papers to real-life application scenarios. In Proceedings of the first Workshop on Information Extraction from Scientific Publications, pages 67–77, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
On the portability of extractive Question-Answering systems on scientific papers to real-life application scenarios (Tahri et al., WIESP 2022)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2022.wiesp-1.8.pdf