UKP-SQUARE: An Online Platform for Question Answering Research
This provides a tool for QA researchers to easily compare and extend specialized pipelines, though it is incremental as it builds on existing QA methods and platforms.
The authors tackled the lack of a unified framework for exploring and comparing diverse question answering pipelines by developing UKP-SQUARE, an online platform that allows users to query and analyze a large collection of QA skills and supports custom skill development with various models and retrieval techniques.
Recent advances in NLP and information retrieval have given rise to a diverse set of question answering tasks that are of different formats (e.g., extractive, abstractive), require different model architectures (e.g., generative, discriminative), and setups (e.g., with or without retrieval). Despite having a large number of powerful, specialized QA pipelines (which we refer to as Skills) that consider a single domain, model or setup, there exists no framework where users can easily explore and compare such pipelines and can extend them according to their needs. To address this issue, we present UKP-SQUARE, an extensible online QA platform for researchers which allows users to query and analyze a large collection of modern Skills via a user-friendly web interface and integrated behavioural tests. In addition, QA researchers can develop, manage, and share their custom Skills using our microservices that support a wide range of models (Transformers, Adapters, ONNX), datastores and retrieval techniques (e.g., sparse and dense). UKP-SQUARE is available on https://square.ukp-lab.de.