SmartFAQs.ai
Back to Learn
Deep Dive

Natural Questions

Natural Questions (NQ) is a large-scale benchmark dataset comprising real Google search engine queries used to train and evaluate Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Open-Domain Question Answering (ODQA) systems. It tests the end-to-end pipeline's ability to find relevant Wikipedia passages and extract precise answers, though it presents a trade-off between real-world query realism and the static nature of its underlying knowledge source.

Definition

Natural Questions (NQ) is a large-scale benchmark dataset comprising real Google search engine queries used to train and evaluate Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Open-Domain Question Answering (ODQA) systems. It tests the end-to-end pipeline's ability to find relevant Wikipedia passages and extract precise answers, though it presents a trade-off between real-world query realism and the static nature of its underlying knowledge source.

Disambiguation

Distinguish from SQuAD; NQ uses 'information-seeking' queries where the user didn't see the answer first, whereas SQuAD questions are manually written based on a provided text.

Visual Metaphor

"The 'Mystery Shopper' test for AI: A collection of real, unscripted questions from the public used to verify if the library's retrieval system and the librarian's comprehension actually work under pressure."

Key Tools
Hugging Face DatasetsBEIR (Benchmarking IR)DPR (Dense Passage Retrieval)PyTorchTensorFlow Datasets
Related Connections

Conceptual Overview

Natural Questions (NQ) is a large-scale benchmark dataset comprising real Google search engine queries used to train and evaluate Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Open-Domain Question Answering (ODQA) systems. It tests the end-to-end pipeline's ability to find relevant Wikipedia passages and extract precise answers, though it presents a trade-off between real-world query realism and the static nature of its underlying knowledge source.

Disambiguation

Distinguish from SQuAD; NQ uses 'information-seeking' queries where the user didn't see the answer first, whereas SQuAD questions are manually written based on a provided text.

Visual Analog

The 'Mystery Shopper' test for AI: A collection of real, unscripted questions from the public used to verify if the library's retrieval system and the librarian's comprehension actually work under pressure.

Related Articles