This work presents a novel four-stage opendomain QA pipeline R2-D2 (RANK TWICE, READ TWICE). The pipeline is composed of a retriever, passage reranker, extractive reader, generative reader and a mechanism that aggregates the final prediction from all system's components. We demonstrate its strength across three open-domain QA datasets: Natu-ralQuestions, TriviaQA and EfficientQA, surpassing state-of-the-art on the first two. Our analysis demonstrates that: (i) combining extractive and generative reader yields absolute improvements up to 5 exact match and it is at least twice as effective as the posterior averaging ensemble of the same models with different parameters, (ii) the extractive reader with fewer parameters can match the performance of the generative reader on extractive QA datasets 1 .
The paper deals with the experimental study of the behaviour of large concrete beams reinforced with glass fibre reinforced polymer (GFRP) rebars exposed to high temperatures equivalent to fire load. The four-point bending test was carried out on the beams after cooling. This study provided values for the load bearing capacity of the beams.
The paper deals with the experimental investigation aimed at the continual monitoring of the process of setting and early hardening in cement pastes and mortars using the measurement equipment Vikasonic. The measurement principle consists in measuring the time of ultrasonic pulses transit through a test specimen placed between two ultrasonic transducers. This innovative method of measurement could in the future suitably complement or, in some cases, completely substitute the measurement of setting in cement composites using the Vicat apparatus. The pilot measurement results performed on the cement pastes and mortars are presented in the paper.
The paper deals with the experimental determination of shrinkage development of the composites based on the alkali-activated slag (AAS). The main aim of the experimental investigation was to verify the effect of the addition of shrinkage-reducing admixture (SRA) on the overall process of shrinkage properties during AAS composites ageing.
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