Question answering models for human–machine interaction in the manufacturing industry

This paper presents a question answering (QA) system that will enable workers from the manufacturing industry to ’hands-free’ request information. This kind of systems, that are broadly used in household context, have started to gain popularity in industrial environments. To develop the system, PDF-based industrial manuals in Spanish have been processed, annotated by experts and used to train the different components of the architecture, i.e. a question classifier and two QA systems. Different metrics have been applied and developed in order to test the performance of the system. The developed architecture obtains high classification and correct response results, demonstrating the viability of these systems in the industry. •Getting a corpus from pdf technical manuals to train Question Answering models.•Generic and specific QA models based on Transformers to get information from manuals.•Voice-based assistant for hands-free support of maintenance tasks based on QA.