Designing a Question Answering System in the Domain of Swedish Technical Consulting Using Deep Learning

Abstract: Question Answering systems are greatly sought after in many areas of industry. Unfortunately, as most research in Natural Language Processing is conducted in English, the applicability of such systems to other languages is limited. Moreover, these systems often struggle in dealing with long text sequences. This thesis explores the possibility of applying existing models to the Swedish language, in a domain where the syntax and semantics differ greatly from typical Swedish texts. Additionally, the text length may vary arbitrarily. To solve these problems, transfer learning techniques and state-of-the-art Question Answering models are investigated. Furthermore, a novel, divide-and-conquer based technique for processing long texts is developed. Results show that the transfer learning is partly unsuccessful, but the system is capable of perform reasonably well in the new domain regardless. Furthermore, the system shows great performance improvement on longer text sequences with the use of the new technique.