@inproceedings{levy-etal-2021-open,
    title = "Open-{D}omain Question-{A}nswering for {COVID}-19 and Other Emergent Domains",
    author = "Levy, Sharon  and
      Mo, Kevin  and
      Xiong, Wenhan  and
      Wang, William Yang",
    editor = "Adel, Heike  and
      Shi, Shuming",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations",
    month = nov,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/2021.emnlp-demo.30/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-demo.30",
    pages = "259--266",
    abstract = "Since late 2019, COVID-19 has quickly emerged as the newest biomedical domain, resulting in a surge of new information. As with other emergent domains, the discussion surrounding the topic has been rapidly changing, leading to the spread of misinformation. This has created the need for a public space for users to ask questions and receive credible, scientific answers. To fulfill this need, we turn to the task of open-domain question-answering, which we can use to efficiently find answers to free-text questions from a large set of documents. In this work, we present such a system for the emergent domain of COVID-19. Despite the small data size available, we are able to successfully train the system to retrieve answers from a large-scale corpus of published COVID-19 scientific papers. Furthermore, we incorporate effective re-ranking and question-answering techniques, such as document diversity and multiple answer spans. Our open-domain question-answering system can further act as a model for the quick development of similar systems that can be adapted and modified for other developing emergent domains."
}