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Evaluation of a QA System

Open In Colab

To be able to make a statement about the performance of a question-answering system, it is important to evalute it. Furthermore, evaluation allows to determine which parts of the system can be improved.

Prepare environment

Colab: Enable the GPU runtime

Make sure you enable the GPU runtime to experience decent speed in this tutorial. Runtime -> Change Runtime type -> Hardware accelerator -> GPU

# Make sure you have a GPU running
!nvidia-smi

Start an Elasticsearch server

You can start Elasticsearch on your local machine instance using Docker. If Docker is not readily available in your environment (eg., in Colab notebooks), then you can manually download and execute Elasticsearch from source.

# Install the latest release of Haystack in your own environment 
#! pip install farm-haystack

# Install the latest master of Haystack
!pip install grpcio-tools==1.34.1
!pip install git+https://github.com/deepset-ai/haystack.git

# In Colab / No Docker environments: Start Elasticsearch from source
! wget https://artifacts.elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch/elasticsearch-7.9.2-linux-x86_64.tar.gz -q
! tar -xzf elasticsearch-7.9.2-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
! chown -R daemon:daemon elasticsearch-7.9.2

import os
from subprocess import Popen, PIPE, STDOUT
es_server = Popen(['elasticsearch-7.9.2/bin/elasticsearch'],
                   stdout=PIPE, stderr=STDOUT,
                   preexec_fn=lambda: os.setuid(1)  # as daemon
                  )
# wait until ES has started
! sleep 30
from farm.utils import initialize_device_settings

device, n_gpu = initialize_device_settings(use_cuda=True)
from haystack.preprocessor.utils import fetch_archive_from_http

# Download evaluation data, which is a subset of Natural Questions development set containing 50 documents
doc_dir = "../data/nq"
s3_url = "https://s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/deepset.ai-farm-qa/datasets/nq_dev_subset_v2.json.zip"
fetch_archive_from_http(url=s3_url, output_dir=doc_dir)
# make sure these indices do not collide with existing ones, the indices will be wiped clean before data is inserted
doc_index = "tutorial5_docs"
label_index = "tutorial5_labels"
# Connect to Elasticsearch
from haystack.document_store.elasticsearch import ElasticsearchDocumentStore

# Connect to Elasticsearch
document_store = ElasticsearchDocumentStore(host="localhost", username="", password="", index="document",
                                            create_index=False, embedding_field="emb",
                                            embedding_dim=768, excluded_meta_data=["emb"])
from haystack.preprocessor import PreProcessor

# Add evaluation data to Elasticsearch Document Store
# We first delete the custom tutorial indices to not have duplicate elements
# and also split our documents into shorter passages using the PreProcessor
preprocessor = PreProcessor(
    split_length=500,
    split_overlap=0,
    split_respect_sentence_boundary=False,
    clean_empty_lines=False,
    clean_whitespace=False
)
document_store.delete_all_documents(index=doc_index)
document_store.delete_all_documents(index=label_index)
document_store.add_eval_data(
    filename="../data/nq/nq_dev_subset_v2.json",
    doc_index=doc_index,
    label_index=label_index,
    preprocessor=preprocessor
)

# Let's prepare the labels that we need for the retriever and the reader
labels = document_store.get_all_labels_aggregated(index=label_index)

Initialize components of QA-System

# Initialize Retriever
from haystack.retriever.sparse import ElasticsearchRetriever
retriever = ElasticsearchRetriever(document_store=document_store)
# Alternative: Evaluate DensePassageRetriever
# Note, that DPR works best when you index short passages < 512 tokens as only those tokens will be used for the embedding.
# Here, for nq_dev_subset_v2.json we have avg. num of tokens = 5220(!).
# DPR still outperforms Elastic's BM25 by a small margin here.
# from haystack.retriever.dense import DensePassageRetriever
# retriever = DensePassageRetriever(document_store=document_store,
#                                  query_embedding_model="facebook/dpr-question_encoder-single-nq-base",
#                                  passage_embedding_model="facebook/dpr-ctx_encoder-single-nq-base",
#                                  use_gpu=True,
#                                  embed_title=True,
#                                  max_seq_len=256,
#                                  batch_size=16,
#                                  remove_sep_tok_from_untitled_passages=True)
#document_store.update_embeddings(retriever, index=doc_index)
# Initialize Reader
from haystack.reader.farm import FARMReader

reader = FARMReader("deepset/roberta-base-squad2", top_k=4, return_no_answer=True)

from haystack.eval import EvalAnswers, EvalDocuments

# Here we initialize the nodes that perform evaluation
eval_retriever = EvalDocuments()
eval_reader = EvalAnswers()

Evaluation of Retriever

Here we evaluate only the retriever, based on whether the gold_label document is retrieved.

## Evaluate Retriever on its own
retriever_eval_results = retriever.eval(top_k=20, label_index=label_index, doc_index=doc_index)
## Retriever Recall is the proportion of questions for which the correct document containing the answer is
## among the correct documents
print("Retriever Recall:", retriever_eval_results["recall"])
## Retriever Mean Avg Precision rewards retrievers that give relevant documents a higher rank
print("Retriever Mean Avg Precision:", retriever_eval_results["map"])

Evaluation of Reader

Here we evaluate only the reader in a closed domain fashion i.e. the reader is given one query and one document and metrics are calculated on whether the right position in this text is selected by the model as the answer span (i.e. SQuAD style)

# Evaluate Reader on its own
reader_eval_results = reader.eval(document_store=document_store, device=device, label_index=label_index, doc_index=doc_index)
# Evaluation of Reader can also be done directly on a SQuAD-formatted file without passing the data to Elasticsearch
#reader_eval_results = reader.eval_on_file("../data/nq", "nq_dev_subset_v2.json", device=device)

## Reader Top-N-Accuracy is the proportion of predicted answers that match with their corresponding correct answer
print("Reader Top-N-Accuracy:", reader_eval_results["top_n_accuracy"])
## Reader Exact Match is the proportion of questions where the predicted answer is exactly the same as the correct answer
print("Reader Exact Match:", reader_eval_results["EM"])
## Reader F1-Score is the average overlap between the predicted answers and the correct answers
print("Reader F1-Score:", reader_eval_results["f1"])

Evaluation of Retriever and Reader (Open Domain)

Here we evaluate retriever and reader in open domain fashion i.e. a document is considered correctly retrieved if it contains the answer string within it. The reader is evaluated based purely on the predicted string, regardless of which document this came from and the position of the extracted span.

from haystack import Pipeline

# Here is the pipeline definition
p = Pipeline()
p.add_node(component=retriever, name="ESRetriever", inputs=["Query"])
p.add_node(component=eval_retriever, name="EvalRetriever", inputs=["ESRetriever"])
p.add_node(component=reader, name="QAReader", inputs=["EvalRetriever"])
p.add_node(component=eval_reader, name="EvalReader", inputs=["QAReader"])
results = []
# This is how to run the pipeline
for l in labels:
    res = p.run(
        query=l.question,
        top_k_retriever=10,
        labels=l,
        top_k_reader=10,
        index=doc_index,
    )
    results.append(res)
# When we have run evaluation using the pipeline, we can print the results
n_queries = len(labels)
eval_retriever.print()
print()
retriever.print_time()
print()
eval_reader.print(mode="reader")
print()
reader.print_time()
print()
eval_reader.print(mode="pipeline")

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