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name: retrieval-qa description: "Use DeepPavlov retrieval, ranking, FAQ, SQuAD, ODQA, and KBQA workflows with correct config, data, index, and input/output choices." metadata: disco-role: operating disable-model-invocation: true license: Apache 2.0

retrieval-qa

Use this sub-skill when a DeepPavlov task involves questions, contexts, documents, document IDs, ranking scores, FAQ categories, answer spans, ODQA pipelines, or Wikidata-style KBQA queries.

Route quickly

• Generic DeepPavlov config syntax, nested config_path, overwrite, registry, train/evaluate/predict modes, and component wiring: ../pipelines/SKILL.md.
• Generic text classification, NER, entity extraction, spelling, syntax, morphology, embedders, or relation extraction outside retrieval/QA: ../text-models/SKILL.md.
• REST or socket deployment after a retrieval/QA config runs locally: ../serving/SKILL.md.
• Shared install/import/cache/backend problems: ../../references/troubleshooting.md.

Start here

1. Choose the workflow family in references/model-catalog.md: doc_retrieval, ranking, squad, odqa, kbqa, or faq.
2. Prepare the required local data/index layout with references/data-and-indexing.md.
3. For a safe local document-retrieval template, generate a two-document config with scripts/tiny_retrieval_config.py.
4. Diagnose retrieval/QA-specific failures with references/troubleshooting.md before escalating to root troubleshooting.

Decision hints

• Use squad when every question has an explicit context batch.
• Use odqa when the user supplies only questions and expects retrieval plus answer extraction over a document collection.
• Use doc_retrieval when the deliverable is document IDs/titles/scores rather than answer spans.
• Use ranking for response ranking or KBQA relation/path ranking; route ordinary classifiers to text-models.
• Use kbqa for Wikidata-style entity/relation/query generation outputs.
• Use faq for fastText/logistic-regression FAQ intent/category lookup or simple CSV FAQ corpora.

Do not reopen the original repository checkout for runtime guidance; use the bundled references and scripts in this sub-skill tree.