Katecheo: A Portable and Modular System for Multi-Topic Question Answering

We introduce a modular system that can be deployed on any Kubernetes cluster for question answering via REST API. This system, called Katecheo, includes four configurable modules that collectively enable identification of questions, classification of those questions into topics, a search of knowledge base articles, and reading comprehension. We demonstrate the system using publicly available, pre-trained models and knowledge base articles extracted from Stack Exchange sites. However, users can extend the system to any number of topics, or domains, without the need to modify any of the model serving code. All components of the system are open source and available under a permissive Apache 2 License.