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.
- 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.
- Make sure you have a deepset Cloud workspace for your question answering pipeline ready.
- 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.
- Download the .zip file from gdrive and unpack it on your computer.
- Log in to deepset Cloud, switch to the workspace you want to use, and go to Data>Files.

- Click Upload Files.
- Drop the files you unpacked in step 1 into the Upload Files window and click Upload.
- Wait until the upload finishes. You should have 344 files. You can check that in the Dashboard.
Result: Your files are in your workspace, and you can see them on the Files page.

Create a Pipeline
In this step, you define how your search is going to run. Let's use the question answering pipeline template to create the pipeline.
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Go to Pipelines>Create Pipeline.
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Type Jazz_English_QA as the pipeline name and choose the Extractive Question Answering template.
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Click Create. You're redirected to the YAML Editor.
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Review the pipeline and click Deploy. This triggers indexing and makes your pipeline ready for running a search.
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In the navigation, click Pipelines and wait until the status of your pipeline changes to Indexed. This may take a while.
Tip: When you hover your mouse over the status, you can see the number of files already indexed.
Result: You created and deployed a pipeline. Your pipeline shows on the Pipelines page with the status Indexed.
Run a Search
Now, it's time to test your pipeline.
- Go to Search.
- Select Jazz_English_QA as the pipeline you want to use.
- 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 24 days ago