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Tutorial: Make Your QA Pipelines Talk!


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Last Updated: September 13, 2024

⚠️Update: This tutorial is now outdated and we recommend moving to Haystack >= 2.0 and checking out the new tutorials here. AnswerToSpeech lives in the text2speech package. Main Haystack repository doesn’t include it anymore.

  • Level: Intermediate
  • Time to complete: 15 minutes
  • Nodes Used: InMemoryDocumentStore, BM25Retriever, FARMReader, AnswerToSpeech
  • Goal: After completing this tutorial, you’ll have created a extractive question answering system that can read out the answer.

Overview

Question answering works primarily on text, but Haystack provides some features for audio files that contain speech as well.

In this tutorial, we’re going to see how to use AnswerToSpeech to convert answers into audio files.

Preparing the Colab Environment

Installing Haystack

To start, let’s install the latest release of Haystack with pip. In this tutorial, we’ll use components from text2speech which contains some extra Haystack components, so we’ll install farm-haystack-text2speech.

%%bash

pip install --upgrade pip
pip install farm-haystack[colab,preprocessing,inference]
pip install farm-haystack-text2speech

Enabling Telemetry

Knowing you’re using this tutorial helps us decide where to invest our efforts to build a better product but you can always opt out by commenting the following line. See Telemetry for more details.

from haystack.telemetry import tutorial_running

tutorial_running(17)

Indexing Documents

We will populate the document store with a simple indexing pipeline. See Tutorial: Build Your First Question Answering System for more details about these steps.

from pathlib import Path
from haystack.document_stores import InMemoryDocumentStore
from haystack.utils import fetch_archive_from_http
from haystack.pipelines import Pipeline
from haystack.nodes import FileTypeClassifier, TextConverter, PreProcessor

# Initialize the DocumentStore
document_store = InMemoryDocumentStore(use_bm25=True)

# Get the documents
documents_path = "data/tutorial17"
s3_url = "https://s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/deepset.ai-farm-qa/datasets/documents/wiki_gameofthrones_txt17.zip"
fetch_archive_from_http(url=s3_url, output_dir=documents_path)

# List all the paths
file_paths = [p for p in Path(documents_path).glob("**/*")]

# NOTE: In this example we're going to use only one text file from the wiki
file_paths = [p for p in file_paths if "Stormborn" in p.name]

# Prepare some basic metadata for the files
files_metadata = [{"name": path.name} for path in file_paths]

# Makes sure the file is a TXT file (FileTypeClassifier node)
classifier = FileTypeClassifier()

# Converts a file into text and performs basic cleaning (TextConverter node)
text_converter = TextConverter(remove_numeric_tables=True)

# - Pre-processes the text by performing splits and adding metadata to the text (Preprocessor node)
preprocessor = PreProcessor(clean_header_footer=True, split_length=200, split_overlap=20)

# Here we create a basic indexing pipeline
indexing_pipeline = Pipeline()
indexing_pipeline.add_node(classifier, name="classifier", inputs=["File"])
indexing_pipeline.add_node(text_converter, name="text_converter", inputs=["classifier.output_1"])
indexing_pipeline.add_node(preprocessor, name="preprocessor", inputs=["text_converter"])
indexing_pipeline.add_node(document_store, name="document_store", inputs=["preprocessor"])

# Then we run it with the documents and their metadata as input
indexing_pipeline.run(file_paths=file_paths, meta=files_metadata)

Creating a QA Pipeline with AnswerToSpeech

Now we will create a pipeline very similar to the basic ExtractiveQAPipeline of Tutorial: Build Your First Question Answering System, with the addition of a node that converts our answers into audio files: AnswerToSpeech. Once the answer is retrieved, we can also listen to the audio version of the document where the answer came from.

from haystack.nodes import BM25Retriever, FARMReader
from text2speech import AnswerToSpeech

retriever = BM25Retriever(document_store=document_store)
reader = FARMReader(model_name_or_path="deepset/roberta-base-squad2", use_gpu=True)
answer2speech = AnswerToSpeech(
    model_name_or_path="espnet/kan-bayashi_ljspeech_vits", generated_audio_dir=Path("./audio_answers")
)

audio_pipeline = Pipeline()
audio_pipeline.add_node(retriever, name="Retriever", inputs=["Query"])
audio_pipeline.add_node(reader, name="Reader", inputs=["Retriever"])
audio_pipeline.add_node(answer2speech, name="AnswerToSpeech", inputs=["Reader"])

Asking a question!

Use the pipeline run() method to ask a question. The query argument is where you type your question. Additionally, you can set the number of documents you want the Reader and Retriever to return using the top-k parameter.

prediction = audio_pipeline.run(
    query="Who is the father of Arya Stark?", params={"Retriever": {"top_k": 10}, "Reader": {"top_k": 5}}
)

# Now you can print prediction
from pprint import pprint

pprint(prediction)

# The document the first answer was extracted from
original_document = [doc for doc in prediction["documents"] if doc.id == prediction["answers"][0].document_ids[0]][0]
pprint(original_document)

Hear Answers out!

Let’s hear the answers and the context they are extracted from.

from IPython.display import display, Audio
import soundfile as sf

# The first answer in isolation

print("Answer: ", prediction["answers"][0].meta["answer_text"])

speech, _ = sf.read(prediction["answers"][0].answer)
display(Audio(speech, rate=24000))

# The context of the first answer

print("Context: ", prediction["answers"][0].meta["context_text"])

speech, _ = sf.read(prediction["answers"][0].context)
display(Audio(speech, rate=24000))

🎉 Congratulations! You’ve learned how to create a extactive QA system that can read out the answer.