SpeechDPR: End-to-End Spoken Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Spoken Question Answering

Understand

Spoken Question Answering (SQA) is essential for machines to reply to user's question by finding the answer span within a given spoken passage.

• SQA has been previously achieved without ASR to avoid recognition errors and Out-of-Vocabulary (OOV) problems.
• However, the real-world problem of Open-domain SQA (openSQA), in which the machine needs to first retrieve passages that possibly contain the answer from a spoken archive in addition, was never considered.
• This paper proposes the first known end-to-end framework, Speech Dense Passage Retriever (SpeechDPR), for the retrieval component of the openSQA problem.