bert-base-qa-squad-colab

🌟 BERT-base SQuAD v1.1 Question Answering Model

Fine-tuned bert-base-uncased on SQuAD v1.1 for English extractive question answering.

This model takes a context paragraph and a question and predicts the most likely answer span inside the context.
It is intended as a compact, educational example of fine-tuning a smol LM (~110M parameters) for QA on Google Colab and deploying it on Hugging Face.

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🔎 Use Cases

• Educational demos of extractive question answering
• Small QA systems over short English paragraphs
• Teaching / learning how to:
  • preprocess SQuAD-style datasets
  • fine-tune BERT with Trainer
  • publish models + Spaces on Hugging Face

⚠️ Not intended for production-critical use (medical/legal/financial advice, etc.).

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🧠 Model Details

• Base model: bert-base-uncased
• Architecture: Encoder-only Transformer with QA span head (start/end logits)
• Parameters: ~110M
• Task: Extractive Question Answering
• Language: English
• Author: omarbayoumi2
• Training platform: Google Colab (free GPU)

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📚 Training Data

• Dataset: SQuAD v1.1 (rajpurkar/squad)
• Train split: ~87k question–answer pairs
• Validation split: ~10k question–answer pairs
• Domain: Wikipedia articles (encyclopedic text)

Each example provides:

• context: paragraph
• question: question string
• answers: list with text and answer_start (character offset)

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⚙️ Training Configuration

Fine-tuning was performed with the Hugging Face Trainer API.

• Optimizer: AdamW (via Trainer)
• Epochs: 2
• Learning rate: 3e-5
• Batch size: 8 (train), 16 (eval)
• Max sequence length: 384
• Doc stride: 128
• Weight decay: 0.01
• Mixed precision: FP16 (when GPU supports it)

Loss is computed as cross-entropy over the start and end token positions.

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📊 Evaluation

Evaluation was performed on the SQuAD v1.1 validation split using the standard SQuAD metric:

• Exact Match (EM): measures whether predicted span matches ground truth span exactly
• F1 score: token-level overlap between predicted and true answer text

Typical results for this setup are:

Scores may vary depending on number of training examples, epochs and random seed.

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🚀 How to Use

1. With Transformers pipeline

from transformers import pipeline

qa = pipeline(
    "question-answering",
    model="omarbayoumi2/bert-base-qa-squad-colab",
)

context = "BERT is a language representation model developed by researchers at Google."
question = "Who developed BERT?"

result = qa(question=question, context=context)
print(result)
# {'score': ..., 'start': ..., 'end': ..., 'answer': 'researchers at Google'}