Contemporary question answering (QA) systems, including transformer-based architectures, suffer from increasing computational and model complexity which render them inefficient for real-world applications with limited resources. Further, training or even finetuning such models requires a vast amount of labeled data which is often not available for the task at hand. In this manuscript, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of the mentioned challenges and introduce suitable countermeasures. We propose a novel knowledge distillation (KD) approach to reduce the parameter and model complexity of a pre-trained BERT system and utilize multiple active learning (AL) strategies for immense reduction in annotation efforts. In particular, we demonstrate that our model achieves the performance of a 6-layer TinyBERT and DistilBERT, whilst using only 2% of their total parameters. Finally, by the integration of our AL approaches into the BERT framework, we show that state-of-the-art results on the SQuAD dataset can be achieved when we only use 20% of the training data.

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