OBQnA

An OpenBook Question 'n' Answer System

Introduction

OBQnA is a high-level OO Python package which aims to provide an easy and intuitive way of creating a OpenBook Question ‘n’ Answer system.

The package parses PDF files using Apache Tika, splits the corpus into passages and calculates their corresponding Dense vector representation exploiting a Transformer NLP model. For each question asked, the system performs a Dense Passage Retrieval, using an efficient similarity search library (Faiss, ScaNN or Annoy) and extracts the answer from the retrieved passages.

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Install

To install simply do pip install -r requirements.tx

• note: If you want to use GPU please install CUDA

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Python code example

We are using J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings Trilogy and the Hobbit for the following example.

For more detailed explanation please read the Documentation.

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Parsing PDFs and performing some basic text cleaning

from obqna.process import PDFParser, Passages
from obqna.qa import QuestionAnswering

parser = PDFParser("../books/") # Path of PDFs
books = parser.parse()
books = parser.clean(books)

Splitting the corpus into passages

passages = Passages()
corpus = passages.df2passages(books)

Calculate the vector represantation of each passage and store the corresponding indices

searcher_type = "scann" # other choices: "faiss", "annoy"
qna = QuestionAnswering(searcher_type)
qna.prepare(corpus)

Ask questions

questions = [
    "Who is Galadriel?",
    "Who is Isildur?",
    "Who is Boromir's father?",
    "Who is Aragorn?",
    "Was the ring destroyed?",
    "What language is on the One Ring inscription?"
]

for question in questions:
    print(f"Question: {question}: ")
    results = qna.ask(question)
    print(f"Answer: {results['answer']}")
    print(10*'-')

Question: Who is Galadriel?: 
Answer: The Lady of Lorien
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Question: Who is Isildur?: 
Answer: Elendils son
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Question: Who is Boromir's father?: 
Answer: Lord Denethor
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Question: Who is Aragorn?: 
Answer: Heir of Isildur
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Question: Was the ring destroyed?: 
Answer: it perished from the world in the ruin of his first realm
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Question: What language is on the One Ring inscription?: 
Answer: Black Speech
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