# A question-answering system for aircraft pilots' documentation

Source: [A question-answering system for aircraft pilots' documentation](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa68d81e209131cea1e9d7>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-25T22:46:52.640Z

Authors: Alexandre Arnold, G\\'erard Dupont, F\\'elix Furger, Catherine Kobus, Fran\\c{c}ois Lancelot

Published: 2020-11-26T13:33:47.000Z

## Abstract

The aerospace industry relies on massive collections of complex and technical documents covering system descriptions, manuals or procedures. This paper presents a question answering (QA) system that would help aircraft pilots access information in this documentation by naturally interacting with the system and asking questions in natural language. After describing each module of the dialog system, we present a multi-task based approach for the QA module which enables performance improvement on a Flight Crew Operating Manual (FCOM) dataset. A method to combine scores from the retriever and the QA modules is also presented.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.13284>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.13284.pdf>)