@inproceedings{li-etal-2021-mlec,
    title = "{MLEC-QA}: {A} {C}hinese {M}ulti-{C}hoice {B}iomedical {Q}uestion {A}nswering {D}ataset",
    author = "Li, Jing  and
      Zhong, Shangping  and
      Chen, Kaizhi",
    editor = "Moens, Marie-Francine  and
      Huang, Xuanjing  and
      Specia, Lucia  and
      Yih, Scott Wen-tau",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = nov,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2021.emnlp-main.698/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.698",
    pages = "8862--8874",
    abstract = "Question Answering (QA) has been successfully applied in scenarios of human-computer interaction such as chatbots and search engines. However, for the specific biomedical domain, QA systems are still immature due to expert-annotated datasets being limited by category and scale. In this paper, we present MLEC-QA, the largest-scale Chinese multi-choice biomedical QA dataset, collected from the National Medical Licensing Examination in China. The dataset is composed of five subsets with 136,236 biomedical multi-choice questions with extra materials (images or tables) annotated by human experts, and first covers the following biomedical sub-fields: Clinic, Stomatology, Public Health, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and Traditional Chinese Medicine Combined with Western Medicine. We implement eight representative control methods and open-domain QA methods as baselines. Experimental results demonstrate that even the current best model can only achieve accuracies between 40{\%} to 55{\%} on five subsets, especially performing poorly on questions that require sophisticated reasoning ability. We hope the release of the MLEC-QA dataset can serve as a valuable resource for research and evaluation in open-domain QA, and also make advances for biomedical QA systems."
}