Speeding Up Question Answering Task of Language Models via Inverted Index

Abstract

Natural language processing applications, such as conversational agents and their question-answering capabilities, are widely used in the real world. Despite the wide popularity of large language models (LLMs), few real-world conversational agents take advantage of LLMs. Extensive resources consumed by LLMs disable developers from integrating them into end-user applications. In this study, we leverage an inverted indexing mechanism combined with LLMs to improve the efficiency of question-answering models for closed-domain questions. Our experiments show that using the index improves the average response time by 97.44%. In addition, due to the reduced search scope, the average BLEU score improved by 0.23 while using the inverted index.