Performance Analysis of a Distributed Question/Answering System

13 years 4 months ago

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The problem of question/answering (Q/A) is to find answers to open-domain questions by searching large collections of documents. Unlike information retrieval systems, very common today in the form of Internet search engines, Q/A systems do not retrieve documents, but instead provide short, relevant answers located in small fragments of text. This enhanced functionality comes with a price: Q/A systems are significantly slower and require more hardware resources than information retrieval systems. This paper proposes a distributed Q/A architecture that: enhances the system throughput through the exploitation of inter-question parallelism and dynamic load balancing, and reduces the individual question response time through the exploitation of intra-question parallelism. Inter and intra-question parallelism are both exploited using several scheduling points: one before the Q/A task is started, and two embedded in the Q/A task. An analytical performance model is introduced. The model analy...

Mihai Surdeanu, Dan I. Moldovan, Sanda M. Harabagi

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