  This paper introduces a novel orchestration framework, called CFO
(COMPUTATION FLOW ORCHESTRATOR), for building, experimenting with, and
deploying interactive NLP (Natural Language Processing) and IR (Information
Retrieval) systems to production environments. We then demonstrate a question
answering system built using this framework which incorporates state-of-the-art
BERT based MRC (Machine Reading Comprehension) with IR components to enable
end-to-end answer retrieval. Results from the demo system are shown to be high
quality in both academic and industry domain specific settings. Finally, we
discuss best practices when (pre-)training BERT based MRC models for production
systems.
