LocalRQA: From Generating Data to Locally Training, Testing, and Deploying Retrieval-Augmented QA Systems

Xiao Yu, Yunan Lu, Zhou Yu


Abstract
Retrieval-augmented question-answering systems combine retrieval techniques with large language models to provide answers that are more accurate and informative. Many existing toolkits allow users to quickly build such systems using off-the-shelf models, but they fall short in supporting researchers and developers to customize the *model training, testing, and deployment process*. We propose LocalRQA, an open-source toolkit that features a wide selection of model training algorithms, evaluation methods, and deployment tools curated from the latest research. As a showcase, we build QA systems using online documentation obtained from Databricks and Faire’s websites. We find 7B-models trained and deployed using LocalRQA reach a similar performance compared to using OpenAI’s text-ada-002 and GPT-4-turbo.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-demos.14
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Yixin Cao, Yang Feng, Deyi Xiong
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
136–151
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-demos.14
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-demos.14
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiao Yu, Yunan Lu, and Zhou Yu. 2024. LocalRQA: From Generating Data to Locally Training, Testing, and Deploying Retrieval-Augmented QA Systems. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations), pages 136–151, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LocalRQA: From Generating Data to Locally Training, Testing, and Deploying Retrieval-Augmented QA Systems (Yu et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-demos.14.pdf