Multilingual XLM-RoBERTa large for Extractive QA on various languages

Overview

Language model: xlm-roberta-large
Language: Multilingual
Downstream-task: Extractive QA
Training data: SQuAD 2.0
Eval data: SQuAD dev set - German MLQA - German XQuAD
Training run: MLFlow link
Code: See an example extractive QA pipeline built with Haystack
Infrastructure: 4x Tesla v100

Hyperparameters

batch_size = 32
n_epochs = 3
base_LM_model = "xlm-roberta-large"
max_seq_len = 256
learning_rate = 1e-5
lr_schedule = LinearWarmup
warmup_proportion = 0.2
doc_stride=128
max_query_length=64

Usage

In Haystack

Haystack is an AI orchestration framework to build customizable, production-ready LLM applications. You can use this model in Haystack to do extractive question answering on documents. To load and run the model with Haystack:

# After running pip install haystack-ai "transformers[torch,sentencepiece]"

from haystack import Document
from haystack.components.readers import ExtractiveReader

docs = [
    Document(content="Python is a popular programming language"),
    Document(content="python ist eine beliebte Programmiersprache"),
]

reader = ExtractiveReader(model="deepset/xlm-roberta-large-squad2")
reader.warm_up()

question = "What is a popular programming language?"
result = reader.run(query=question, documents=docs)
# {'answers': [ExtractedAnswer(query='What is a popular programming language?', score=0.5740374326705933, data='python', document=Document(id=..., content: '...'), context=None, document_offset=ExtractedAnswer.Span(start=0, end=6),...)]}

For a complete example with an extractive question answering pipeline that scales over many documents, check out the corresponding Haystack tutorial.

In Transformers

from transformers import AutoModelForQuestionAnswering, AutoTokenizer, pipeline

model_name = "deepset/xlm-roberta-large-squad2"

# a) Get predictions
nlp = pipeline('question-answering', model=model_name, tokenizer=model_name)
QA_input = {
    'question': 'Why is model conversion important?',
    'context': 'The option to convert models between FARM and transformers gives freedom to the user and let people easily switch between frameworks.'
}
res = nlp(QA_input)

# b) Load model & tokenizer
model = AutoModelForQuestionAnswering.from_pretrained(model_name)
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name)

Performance

Evaluated on the SQuAD 2.0 English dev set with the official eval script.

  "exact": 79.45759285774446,
  "f1": 83.79259828925511,
  "total": 11873,
  "HasAns_exact": 71.96356275303644,
  "HasAns_f1": 80.6460053117963,
  "HasAns_total": 5928,
  "NoAns_exact": 86.93019343986543,
  "NoAns_f1": 86.93019343986543,
  "NoAns_total": 5945

Evaluated on German MLQA: test-context-de-question-de.json

"exact": 49.34691166703564,
"f1": 66.15582561674236,
"total": 4517,

Evaluated on German XQuAD: xquad.de.json

"exact": 61.51260504201681,
"f1": 78.80206098332569,
"total": 1190,

Usage

In Haystack

For doing QA at scale (i.e. many docs instead of single paragraph), you can load the model also in haystack:

reader = FARMReader(model_name_or_path="deepset/xlm-roberta-large-squad2")
# or 
reader = TransformersReader(model="deepset/xlm-roberta-large-squad2",tokenizer="deepset/xlm-roberta-large-squad2")

In Transformers

from transformers import AutoModelForQuestionAnswering, AutoTokenizer, pipeline

model_name = "deepset/xlm-roberta-large-squad2"

# a) Get predictions
nlp = pipeline('question-answering', model=model_name, tokenizer=model_name)
QA_input = {
    'question': 'Why is model conversion important?',
    'context': 'The option to convert models between FARM and transformers gives freedom to the user and let people easily switch between frameworks.'
}
res = nlp(QA_input)

# b) Load model & tokenizer
model = AutoModelForQuestionAnswering.from_pretrained(model_name)
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name)