“Who is an NLP expert?” - Lessons Learned from building an in-house QA-system

Innovations such as sentence-transformers, neural search and vector databases fueled a very fast development of question-answering systems recently. At scieneers, we wanted to test those components to satisfy our own information needs using a slack-bot that will answer our questions by reading through our internal documents and slack-conversations. We therefore leveraged the HayStack QA-Framework in combination with a Weaviate vector database and many fine-tuned NLP-models. This talk will give you insights in both, the technical challenges we faced and the organizational learnings we took.