DEEPAGÉ: Answering Questions in Portuguese about the Brazilian Environment
This addresses the need for Portuguese-language QA tools to increase social awareness about environmental issues in Brazil, though it is incremental in method.
The paper tackled the problem of answering Portuguese questions about the Brazilian environment by developing QA systems that combine BM25 and PTT5, achieving an F1-score of 36.2.
The challenge of climate change and biome conservation is one of the most pressing issues of our time - particularly in Brazil, where key environmental reserves are located. Given the availability of large textual databases on ecological themes, it is natural to resort to question answering (QA) systems to increase social awareness and understanding about these topics. In this work, we introduce multiple QA systems that combine in novel ways the BM25 algorithm, a sparse retrieval technique, with PTT5, a pre-trained state-of-the-art language model. Our QA systems focus on the Portuguese language, thus offering resources not found elsewhere in the literature. As training data, we collected questions from open-domain datasets, as well as content from the Portuguese Wikipedia and news from the press. We thus contribute with innovative architectures and novel applications, attaining an F1-score of 36.2 with our best model.