Question Answering: past, present and future

In this lecture I'll walk students through the evolution of the Question Answering field in the last two decades, starting from traditional feature based approaches to the most recent solutions based on pre-trained Language Models such as BERT and GPT.  I will provide examples of those system taken from my direct research experience. I will conclude the talk envisioning the future of the field, introducing zero / few shot learning and generative approaches, showing how this paradigm is going to revolutionize the field.