Papers › Sequence tagging for biomedical extractive question answering
Sequence tagging for biomedical extractive question answering
Wonjin Yoon, Richard Jackson, Aron Lagerberg, Jaewoo Kang
Current studies in extractive question answering (EQA) have modeled the single-span extraction setting, where a single answer span is a label to predict for a given question-passage pair. This setting is natural for general domain EQA as the majority of the questions in the general domain can be answered with a single span. Following general domain EQA models, current biomedical EQA (BioEQA) models utilize the single-span extraction setting with post-processing steps. In this article, we investigate the question distribution across the general and biomedical domains and discover biomedical questions are more likely to require list-type answers (multiple answers) than factoid-type answers (single answer). This necessitates the models capable of producing multiple answers for a question. Based on this preliminary study, we propose a sequence tagging approach for BioEQA, which is a multi-span extraction setting. Our approach directly tackles questions with a variable number of phrases as their answer and can learn to decide the number of answers for a question from training data. Our experimental results on the BioASQ 7b and 8b list-type questions outperformed the best-performing existing models without requiring post-processing steps. Source codes and resources are freely available for download at https://github.com/dmis-lab/SeqTagQA
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