Zengfeng Zeng


2022

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Hierarchical Representation-based Dynamic Reasoning Network for Biomedical Question Answering
Jianguo Mao | Jiyuan Zhang | Zengfeng Zeng | Weihua Peng | Wenbin Jiang | Xiangdong Wang | Hong Liu | Yajuan Lyu
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Recently, Biomedical Question Answering (BQA) has attracted growing attention due to its application value and technical challenges. Most existing works treat it as a semantic matching task that predicts answers by computing confidence among questions, options and evidence sentences, which is insufficient for scenarios that require complex reasoning based on a deep understanding of biomedical evidences. We propose a novel model termed Hierarchical Representation-based Dynamic Reasoning Network (HDRN) to tackle this problem. It first constructs the hierarchical representations for biomedical evidences to learn semantics within and among evidences. It then performs dynamic reasoning based on the hierarchical representations of evidences to solve complex biomedical problems. Against the existing state-of-the-art model, the proposed model significantly improves more than 4.5%, 3% and 1.3% on three mainstream BQA datasets, PubMedQA, MedQA-USMLE and NLPEC. The ablation study demonstrates the superiority of each improvement of our model. The code will be released after the paper is published.