Question Answering

Question Answering models can retrieve the answer to a question from a given text, which is useful for searching for an answer in a document.

For more details about the question-answering task, check out its dedicated page! You will find examples and related materials.

Recommended models

deepset/roberta-base-squad2: A robust baseline model for most question answering domains.
distilbert/distilbert-base-cased-distilled-squad: Small yet robust model that can answer questions.
google/tapas-base-finetuned-wtq: A special model that can answer questions from tables.

Explore all available models and find the one that suits you best here.

Using the API

Language

Client

Provider

Settings

from huggingface_hub import InferenceClient

client = InferenceClient(
    provider="hf-inference",
    api_key="hf_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx",
)

result = client.question_answering(
    inputs={
    "question": "What is my name?",
    "context": "My name is Clara and I live in Berkeley."
},
    model="distilbert/distilbert-base-cased-distilled-squad",
)

API specification

Request

Headers
authorization	string	Authentication header in the form `'Bearer: hf_**'` when `hf_**` is a personal user access token with “Inference Providers” permission. You can generate one from your settings page.

Payload
inputs*	object	One (context, question) pair to answer
context*	string	The context to be used for answering the question
question*	string	The question to be answered
parameters	object
top_k	integer	The number of answers to return (will be chosen by order of likelihood). Note that we return less than topk answers if there are not enough options available within the context.
doc_stride	integer	If the context is too long to fit with the question for the model, it will be split in several chunks with some overlap. This argument controls the size of that overlap.
max_answer_len	integer	The maximum length of predicted answers (e.g., only answers with a shorter length are considered).
max_seq_len	integer	The maximum length of the total sentence (context + question) in tokens of each chunk passed to the model. The context will be split in several chunks (using docStride as overlap) if needed.
max_question_len	integer	The maximum length of the question after tokenization. It will be truncated if needed.
handle_impossible_answer	boolean	Whether to accept impossible as an answer.
align_to_words	boolean	Attempts to align the answer to real words. Improves quality on space separated languages. Might hurt on non-space-separated languages (like Japanese or Chinese)

Response

Body
(array)	object[]	Output is an array of objects.
answer	string	The answer to the question.
score	number	The probability associated to the answer.
start	integer	The character position in the input where the answer begins.
end	integer	The character position in the input where the answer ends.