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Tutorial: Building Your First Question Answering App

This tutorial guides you through the process of building an English question answering pipeline in the fastest and easiest possible way. It uses the UI to upload the sample dataset and it teaches you how to create a pipeline from the template.

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  • Level: Beginner
  • Time to complete: 10 minutes
  • Prerequisites:
    • This tutorial assumes a basic knowledge of NLP.
    • You must be an Admin to complete this tutorial.
  • Goal: After completing this tutorial, you will have built a complete English question answering app that can answer various questions about jazz.

Upload Files

You need files the search will run on.

  1. Download the .zip file from gdrive and unpack it on your computer.
  2. Log in to deepset Cloud and go to Data>Files.
  3. Click Upload Files.
  4. Drop the files you unpacked in step 1 into the Upload Files window and click Upload. You should have 344 files. You can check that on the Dashboard.

Result: Your files are in your workspace, and you can see them on the Files page.

A screenshot of the Files page with a list of uploaded files displayed.

Create a Pipeline

In this step, you define how your search is going to run. We'll use a question answering pipeline template to create our pipeline.

  1. Go to Pipelines>New Pipeline.
  2. Under YAML Editor, click Create Pipeline and select From Template.
A screenshot of the YAML Editor component with the From Template option underlined
  1. When the templates show up, select the English Question Answering template.
  2. In the Pipeline Designer, change the pipeline name in line 8 to Jazz_English_QA and save the pipeline.
  1. Click Deploy. This triggers indexing and makes your pipeline ready for running a search.
  2. Return to the Pipelines page and wait until the status of your pipeline changes to Indexed. This may take a while, so please be patient.
    Tip: When you hover your mouse over the status, you can see how many files have already been indexed.

Result: You created and deployed a pipeline. Your pipeline shows on the Pipelines page with the status Indexed.

A screenshot of the Pipelines page with the Jazz English QA pipeline shown as indexed and deployed.

Run a Search

Now it's time to test your pipeline.

  1. Go to Search.
  2. Select Jazz_English_QA as the pipeline you want to use.
  3. Now, search for an answer to this question: "How many people attended Duke Ellington's funeral?"
    You should get a number of answers.

Result: There! You've built a live question answering system from beginning to end. You can now ask your app questions related to jazz, and it will answer them.

Updated 2 months ago

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