Reproducible and Efficient Multi-modal Open Retrieval Question Answering

Abstract

Open Retrieval Question Answering (OpenQA) systems are made of two key components: retrievers and readers, both of which have seen rapid advancements in their cross-lingual capabilities across modalities. This brings up a new challenge of ensuring efficiency, reproducibility and easy reusability of these state-of-the-art (SOTA) retrievers and readers. In this tutorial, we will first cover recent advances in multilingual and multi-modal retrievers and readers across structured tabular data and unstructured text data, with a specific focus to using them in OpenQA. We will also introduce a novel toolkit which hosts multiple SOTA retrievers and readers, and have hands-on sessions to demonstrate how to build robust OpenQA systems with SOTA models using this toolkit. https://ijcai-23.org/tutorials/ This is a 3 hour tutorial with presenters from IBM, Stanford, UIUC, UWaterloo