Reader
A reader is a question-answering model or component that analyzes retrieved document context to extract or generate an answer.
AI-Powered Search
A reader is a question-answering model or component that analyzes document context and predicts the answer span for a question.
- How it is used
- Extracts answer spans from search-retrieved contexts and supplies scores for answer selection or document reranking.
- How deep it goes
- Explains span prediction, confidence scoring, pipeline integration, metadata handling, and holdout evaluation, but not model internals.
- Examples
- Uses minimalist-shoe definitions, outdoor question-answering pairs, retrieved document tables, and a ten-example holdout evaluation.
- What you can do after
- Build it with a Transformers pipeline that processes retrieved contexts and returns answer text, scores, identifiers, and URLs.
Natural Language Processing in Action, Second Edition
A Reader is a Haystack question-answering component that extracts an answer from the retrieved document context.
- How it is used
- Processes retrieved documents to extract answers in a semantic-search question-answering pipeline.
- How deep it goes
- Explains the Reader’s pipeline role and model selection, but does not descend into transformer inference internals.
- Examples
- Uses TransformersReader with roberta-base-squad2 and connects it to EmbeddingRetriever in Haystack.
- What you can do after
- Apply it via Haystack to build an extractive QA pipeline over documents retrieved by semantic search.
Read how Natural Language Processing in Action, Second Edition explains reader →
Related concepts
- Retrieverconfigures · A retriever is a software component that searches or queries an information source and returns items relevant to a query for use by downstream processes.
- solutionproduces · A solution is an answer, approach, or assignment intended to address a problem or meet specified objectives or requirements.
- answer spanproduces · An answer span is a contiguous segment of text selected or proposed as an answer to a question within a source document.
- question answeringpart of · Question answering is the computational task of producing, selecting, or extracting an answer to a natural-language question using available information or knowledge.
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