UKP-SQUARE: An Online Platform for Question Answering Research

TL;DR

UKP-SQUARE is an online platform that enables researchers to explore, compare, and extend diverse question answering pipelines and models through a user-friendly interface and microservices.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive, extensible platform for QA research that integrates multiple models, retrieval techniques, and supports custom pipeline development.

Findings

Facilitates easy exploration and comparison of QA models.

Supports development and sharing of custom QA skills.

Provides a unified interface for diverse QA tasks.

Abstract

Recent advances in NLP and information retrieval have given rise to a diverse set of question answering tasks that are of different formats (e.g., extractive, abstractive), require different model architectures (e.g., generative, discriminative), and setups (e.g., with or without retrieval). Despite having a large number of powerful, specialized QA pipelines (which we refer to as Skills) that consider a single domain, model or setup, there exists no framework where users can easily explore and compare such pipelines and can extend them according to their needs. To address this issue, we present UKP-SQUARE, an extensible online QA platform for researchers which allows users to query and analyze a large collection of modern Skills via a user-friendly web interface and integrated behavioural tests. In addition, QA researchers can develop, manage, and share their custom Skills using our microservices that support a wide range of models (Transformers, Adapters, ONNX), datastores and retrieval techniques (e.g., sparse and dense). UKP-SQUARE is available on https://square.ukp-lab.de.