Yes, there is a line of research combining passage retrieval with question answering. The query is used to rank passages in a database. The top-k passages are c

Yes, there is a line of research combining passage retrieval with question answering. The query is used to rank passages in a database. The top-k passages are concatenated to the question and used as input by GPT to generate an answer. This means you can keep the model fixed and update the text corpus. Also, you can separate linguistic knowledge from domain knowledge. I think a new type of apps are going to popularise this: a language model + a personal database + web search. It can be used to recall/summarise/search/ information, a general tool for research and cognitive tasks, a GPT-3 Evernote cross breed.