Surmize: An Online NLP System for Close-Domain Question-Answering and Summarization

Abstract: The amount of data available and consumed by people globally is growing. To reduce mental fatigue and increase the general ability to gain insight into complex texts or documents, we have developed an application to aid in this task. The application allows users to upload documents and ask domain-specific questions about them using our web application. A summarized version of each document is presented to the user, which could further facilitate their understanding of the document and guide them towards what types of questions could be relevant to ask. Our application allows users flexibility with the types of documents that can be processed, it is publicly available, stores no user data, and uses state-of-the-art models for its summaries and answers. The result is an application that yields near human-level intuition for answering questions in certain isolated cases, such as Wikipedia and news articles, as well as some scientific texts. The application shows a decrease in reliability and its prediction as to the complexity of the subject, the number of words in the document, and grammatical inconsistency in the questions increases. These are all aspects that can be improved further if used in production.