D19-3006@ACL

#1 CFO: A Framework for Building Production NLP Systems [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi¹] [REL]

Authors: Rishav Chakravarti, Cezar Pendus, Andrzej Sakrajda, Anthony Ferritto, Lin Pan, Michael Glass, Vittorio Castelli, J. William Murdock, Radu Florian, Salim Roukos, Avi Sil

This paper introduces a novel orchestration framework, called CFO (Computation Flow Orchestrator), for building, experimenting with, and deploying interactive NLP (Natural Language Processing) and IR (Information Retrieval) systems to production environments. We then demonstrate a question answering system built using this framework which incorporates state-of-the-art BERT based MRC (Machine Reading Com- prehension) with IR components to enable end-to-end answer retrieval. Results from the demo system are shown to be high quality in both academic and industry domain specific settings. Finally, we discuss best practices when (pre-)training BERT based MRC models for production systems. Screencast links: - Short video (< 3 min): http: //ibm.biz/gaama_demo - Supplementary long video (< 13 min): http://ibm.biz/gaama_cfo_demo