Systems and methods for building a domain-agnostic answering system using summarization driven scoring

Abstract

A domain-agnostic answering system configured to: (a) receive a question and one or more documents; (b) generate summary representations the one or more documents, each summary representation including a summary having one or more sentences and a score vector; (d) determine that a first summary representation of the summary representations is a winning candidate for extracting an answer to the question; (e) match the first summary representation to a first document in the one or more documents to obtain reference indexes of sentences in the first summary representation in portions of the first document; (f) determine a start logit vector and an end logit vector from the question and the matched first summary representation; and (g) generate a start span and an end span from the start logit vector, the end logit vector, and the score vector associated with the first summary representation, the start span and the end span representing the answer to the question.