In this work, we propose an efficient answer retrieval system **EARS**: a production-ready, factual question answering (QA) system that combines local knowledge base search with generative, context-based QA. To assess the quality of the generated content, we devise comprehensive metrics for both manual and automatic evaluation of the answers to questions. A distinctive feature of our system is the Ranker component, which ranks answer candidates based on their relevance. This feature enhances the effectiveness of local knowledge base retrieval by 23%. Another crucial aspect of our system is the LLM, which utilizes contextual information from a web search API to generate responses. This results in substantial 92.8% boost in the usefulness of voice-based responses. **EARS** is language-agnostic and can be applied to any data domain.

One of the main obstacles for deploying Active Learning (AL) in practical NLP tasks is high computational cost of modern deep learning models. This issue can be partially mitigated by applying lightweight models as an acquisition model, but it can lead to the acquisition-successor mismatch (ASM) problem. Previous works show that the ASM problem can be partially alleviated by using distilled versions of a successor models as acquisition ones. However, distilled versions of pretrained models are not always available. Also, the exact pipeline of model distillation that does not lead to the ASM problem is not clear. To address these issues, we propose to use adapters as an alternative to full fine-tuning for acquisition model training. Since adapters are lightweight, this approach reduces the training cost of the model. We provide empirical evidence that it does not cause the ASM problem and can help to deploy active learning in practical NLP tasks.

The task of generating long narratives using Large Language Models (LLMs) is a largely unexplored area within natural language processing (NLP). Although modern LLMs can handle up to 1 million tokens, ensuring coherence and control over long story generation is still a significant challenge. This paper investigates the use of summarization techniques to create extended narratives, specifically targeting long stories. We propose a special prompting scheme that segments the narrative into several parts and chapters, each generated iteratively with contextual information. Our approach is evaluated with GAPELMAPER, a sophisticated text coherence metric, for automatic evaluation to maintain the structural integrity of the generated stories. We also rely on human evaluation to assess the quality of the generated text. This research advances the development of tools for long story generation in NLP, highlighting both the potential and current limitations of LLMs in this field.