{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/schema2qa-answering-complex-queries-on-the","title":"Schema2QA: High-Quality and Low-Cost Q&A Agents for the Structured Web","arxiv_id":"2001.05609","date":"2020-01-16","proceeding":null,"authors":["Silei Xu","Giovanni Campagna","Jian Li","Monica S. Lam"],"abstract":"Building a question-answering agent currently requires large annotated datasets, which are prohibitively expensive. This paper proposes Schema2QA, an open-source toolkit that can generate a Q&A system from a database schema augmented with a few annotations for each field. The key concept is to cover the space of possible compound queries on the database with a large number of in-domain questions synthesized with the help of a corpus of generic query templates. The synthesized data and a small paraphrase set are used to train a novel neural network based on the BERT pretrained model. We use Schema2QA to generate Q&A systems for five Schema.org domains, restaurants, people, movies, books and music, and obtain an overall accuracy between 64% and 75% on crowdsourced questions for these domains. Once annotations and paraphrases are obtained for a Schema.org schema, no additional manual effort is needed to create a Q&A agent for any website that uses the same schema. Furthermore, we demonstrate that learning can be transferred from the restaurant to the hotel domain, obtaining a 64% accuracy on crowdsourced questions with no manual effort. Schema2QA achieves an accuracy of 60% on popular restaurant questions that can be answered using Schema.org. Its performance is comparable to Google Assistant, 7% lower than Siri, and 15% higher than Alexa. It outperforms all these assistants by at least 18% on more complex, long-tail questions.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.05609v6","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.05609v6.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"schema2qa-answering-complex-queries-on-the","repo_url":"https://github.com/stanford-oval/genie-toolkit","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"Apache-2.0"}},{"paper_slug":"schema2qa-answering-complex-queries-on-the","repo_url":"https://github.com/stanford-oval/genienlp","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"schema2qa-answering-complex-queries-on-the","repo_url":"https://github.com/stanford-oval/schema2qa","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"NOASSERTION"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"semantic-parsing","task_name":"Semantic Parsing"},{"task_slug":"transfer-learning","task_name":"Transfer Learning"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"attention-dropout","method_name":"Attention Dropout"},{"method_slug":"bert","method_name":"BERT"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"linear-warmup-with-linear-decay","method_name":"Linear Warmup With Linear Decay"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"weight-decay","method_name":"Weight Decay"},{"method_slug":"wordpiece","method_name":"WordPiece"}],"datasets_introduced":[{"slug":"schema2qa","name":"Stanford Schema2QA Dataset","full_name":""}],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2001.05609","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}