Building a deep learning-based QA system from a CQA dataset

A man-made machine-reading comprehension (MRC) dataset is necessary to train the answer extraction part of existing Question Answering (QA) systems. However, a high-quality and well-structured dataset with question-paragraph-answer pairs is not usually found in the real world. Furthermore, updating or building an MRC dataset is a challenging and costly affair. To address these shortcomings, we propose a QA system that uses a large-scale English Community Question Answering (CQA) dataset (i.e., Stack Exchange) composed of 3,081,834 question-answer pairs. The QA system adopts a classifier-retriever-summarizer structure design. The question classifier and the answer retriever part are based on a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) Natural Language Processing (NLP) model by Google, and the summarizer part introduces a deep learning-based Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer (T5) model to summarize the long answers. We instantiated the proposed QA system with 140 topics from the CQA dataset (including topics such as biology, law, politics, etc.) and conducted human and automatic evaluations. Our system presented encouraging results, considering that it provides high-quality answers to the questions in the test set and satisfied the requirements to develop a QA system without MRC datasets. Our results show the potential of building automatic and high-performance QA systems without being limited by man-made datasets, a significant step forward in the research of open-domain or specific-domain QA systems.