T8: Open-Domain Question Answering

Danqi Chen and Scott Wen-tau Yih

Live Session: Jul 5 (22:00-01:30 GMT)
Abstract: This tutorial provides a comprehensive and coherent overview of cutting-edge research in open-domain question answering (QA), the task of answering questions using a large collection of documents of diversified topics. We will start by first giving a brief historical background, discussing the basic setup and core technical challenges of the research problem, and then describe modern datasets with the common evaluation metrics and benchmarks. The focus will then shift to cutting-edge models proposed for open-domain QA, including two-stage retriever-reader approaches, dense retriever and end-to-end training, and retriever-free methods. Finally, we will cover some hybrid approaches using both text and large knowledge bases and conclude the tutorial with important open questions. We hope that the tutorial will not only help the audience to acquire up-to-date knowledge but also provide new perspectives to stimulate the advances of open-domain QA research in the next phase.

Information about the virtual format of this tutorial: This tutorial has slides on its website that you can see anytime (It does not have any prerecorded talk). It will be conducted entirely live on Zoom and will be livestreamed on this page. It has a chat window that you can use to have discussions with the tutorial teachers and other attendees anytime during the conference.

Live Session