Real-Time Open-Domain Question Answering with Dense-Sparse Phrase Index

Minjoon Seo, Jinhyuk Lee, Tom Kwiatkowski, Ankur Parikh, Ali Farhadi, Hannaneh Hajishirzi


Abstract
Existing open-domain question answering (QA) models are not suitable for real-time usage because they need to process several long documents on-demand for every input query, which is computationally prohibitive. In this paper, we introduce query-agnostic indexable representations of document phrases that can drastically speed up open-domain QA. In particular, our dense-sparse phrase encoding effectively captures syntactic, semantic, and lexical information of the phrases and eliminates the pipeline filtering of context documents. Leveraging strategies for optimizing training and inference time, our model can be trained and deployed even in a single 4-GPU server. Moreover, by representing phrases as pointers to their start and end tokens, our model indexes phrases in the entire English Wikipedia (up to 60 billion phrases) using under 2TB. Our experiments on SQuAD-Open show that our model is on par with or more accurate than previous models with 6000x reduced computational cost, which translates into at least 68x faster end-to-end inference benchmark on CPUs. Code and demo are available at nlp.cs.washington.edu/denspi
Anthology ID:
P19-1436
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4430–4441
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1436
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1436
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Minjoon Seo, Jinhyuk Lee, Tom Kwiatkowski, Ankur Parikh, Ali Farhadi, and Hannaneh Hajishirzi. 2019. Real-Time Open-Domain Question Answering with Dense-Sparse Phrase Index. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 4430–4441, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Real-Time Open-Domain Question Answering with Dense-Sparse Phrase Index (Seo et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1436.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/P19-1436.mp4
Code
 uwnlp/denspi
Data
SQuAD