Katecheo: A Portable and Modular System for Multi-Topic Question Answering

TL;DR

Katecheo is a modular, open-source question answering system that can be easily deployed on Kubernetes, supporting multi-topic queries without requiring model retraining or code modifications.

Contribution

The paper presents a portable, configurable system for multi-topic question answering that can be extended to new domains without retraining models or modifying code.

Findings

System successfully deployed on Kubernetes clusters

Supports extension to new topics without retraining

Open source components facilitate customization and deployment

Abstract

We introduce a modular system that can be deployed on any Kubernetes cluster for question answering via REST API. This system, called Katecheo, includes three configurable modules that collectively enable identification of questions, classification of those questions into topics, document search, and reading comprehension. We demonstrate the system using publicly available knowledge base articles extracted from Stack Exchange sites. However, users can extend the system to any number of topics, or domains, without the need to modify any of the model serving code or train their own models. All components of the system are open source and available under a permissive Apache 2 License.