LasigeBioTM at MEDIQA 2019: Biomedical Question Answering using Bidirectional Transformers and Named Entity Recognition

Andre Lamurias, Francisco M Couto


Abstract
Biomedical Question Answering (QA) aims at providing automated answers to user questions, regarding a variety of biomedical topics. For example, these questions may ask for related to diseases, drugs, symptoms, or medical procedures. Automated biomedical QA systems could improve the retrieval of information necessary to answer these questions. The MEDIQA challenge consisted of three tasks concerning various aspects of biomedical QA. This challenge aimed at advancing approaches to Natural Language Inference (NLI) and Recognizing Question Entailment (RQE), which would then result in enhanced approaches to biomedical QA. Our approach explored a common Transformer-based architecture that could be applied to each task. This approach shared the same pre-trained weights, but which were then fine-tuned for each task using the provided training data. Furthermore, we augmented the training data with external datasets and enriched the question and answer texts using MER, a named entity recognition tool. Our approach obtained high levels of accuracy, in particular on the NLI task, which classified pairs of text according to their relation. For the QA task, we obtained higher Spearman’s rank correlation values using the entities recognized by MER.
Anthology ID:
W19-5057
Volume:
Proceedings of the 18th BioNLP Workshop and Shared Task
Month:
August
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Venue:
BioNLP
SIG:
SIGBIOMED
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
523–527
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-5057
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-5057
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Andre Lamurias and Francisco M Couto. 2019. LasigeBioTM at MEDIQA 2019: Biomedical Question Answering using Bidirectional Transformers and Named Entity Recognition. In Proceedings of the 18th BioNLP Workshop and Shared Task, pages 523–527, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LasigeBioTM at MEDIQA 2019: Biomedical Question Answering using Bidirectional Transformers and Named Entity Recognition (Lamurias & Couto, BioNLP 2019)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/W19-5057.pdf