BIRD-QA: A BERT-based Information Retrieval Approach to Domain Specific Question Answering
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
During recent years, Question Answering (QA) systems have been widely used in many industries to provide round the clock online services to consumers from all over the world. The importance of such services became more evident during the pandemic in online medical services, education, training, marketing, system support and administration. Most of the existing systems apply simple rule-based QA strategy. Human-defined rules are used to apply pattern matching for extracting information from a given data or knowledge base to generate responses to user queries. However, rule-based pattern matching techniques are not intelligent enough to understand the context of the question to always generate appropriate responses and are static. In this work, we explored different data preprocessing strategies and BERT-style pre-trained models to build an information retrieval (IR)-based Domain specific QA framework named BIRD-QA, and created a domain specific knowledge base using website data of a university department. We implemented multiple variations of extended BERT and ALBERT-base models and validated our framework on reading comprehension task using the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) 1.1 and 2.0 datasets. Our extended ALBERT-based model achieved 75.4% Exact Match (EM) score and 78.8% F1 score. We also present a small feasibility test of our framework for departmental QA using data from a university website.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it