Configuration

NeuralQA provides an interface to specify properties of each module (ui, retriever, reader, expander) via a yaml configuration file. When you launch the ui, you can specify the path to your config file –config-path. If this is not provided, NeuralQA will search for a config.yaml in the current folder or create a [default copy](neuralqa/config_default.yaml)) in the current folder. Sample configuration for the UI is shown below:

UI Configuration

The code snippet below shows how you can configure parts of the main user interface for NeuralQA.

Note

You will need to restart NeuralQA each time you make a change to config.yaml. You can show/hide sections of the UI e.g. show/hide retrieved passages, show only top answer or all answers, show or hide the advanced options view etc. You can also change the default title and description of the page.

ui:
header:
    appname: NeuralQA
    appdescription: Question Answering on Large Datasets
queryview:
    intro:
    title: "NeuralQA: Question Answering on Large Datasets"
    subtitle: "NeuralQA is an interactive tool for question answering (passage retrieval + document reading). You can manually provide a passage or select a search index from (e.g. case.law ) dataset under the QA configuration settings below. To begin, type in a question query below."
    disclaimer: " .. "
    views:
    intro: True
    advanced: True # if false, default retriever/reader settings will be used.
    samples: True # show/hide sample question answer pairs
    passages: True # show/hide passages which are retrieved
    explanations: True # show/hide explanations button
    allanswers: True # show all answers or just the best answer (based on probability score)
    expander: False # show or hide the expander dropdown.
    options:
    stride:
        title: Token Stride
        selected: 0
        options:
        - name: 0
            value: 0
        - name: 50
            value: 50
        - name: 100
            value: 100
        - name: 200
            value: 200
    maxdocuments:
        title: Max Documents
        selected: 5
        options:
        - name: 5
            value: 5
        - name: 10
            value: 10
        - name: 15
            value: 15
    highlightspan:
        title: Highlight Span
        selected: 250
        options:
        - name: 150
            value: 150
        - name: 250
            value: 250
        - name: 350
            value: 350
        - name: 450
            value: 450
        - name: 650
            value: 650
    samples:

Reader Configuration

You can configure the reader models that are available for use with the NeuralQA api and web interface. Because NeuralQA uses the HuggingFace api, reader models can be specified using either the path to a hosted HuggingFace model or the path to a local folder on disk contained a trained HuggingFace model.

reader:
title: Reader
selected: twmkn9/distilbert-base-uncased-squad2  #default selected reader on startup. Should correspond to the reader value
options:
    - name: DistilBERT SQUAD2
    value: twmkn9/distilbert-base-uncased-squad2
    type: distilbert
    - name: BERT SQUAD2
    value: deepset/bert-base-cased-squad2
    type: bert
    - name: Medical BERT SQUAD2
    value: /Users/user/Downloads/meddistilbert  # example path to a local model on disk
    type: bert

Memory Requirements

To enable fast user interaction, NeuralQA loads models weights that are specified in config.yaml into memory when the application is launched. For example, if 3 Bert base reader models (~425MB each) specified in config.yaml, each of these will be loaded into memory. Similarly all specified query expansion models will also be loaded into memory. Plan to account for these when using NeuralQA.