English

Neural Question Answering at BioASQ 5B

Computation and Language 2017-06-28 v1 Artificial Intelligence Neural and Evolutionary Computing

Abstract

This paper describes our submission to the 2017 BioASQ challenge. We participated in Task B, Phase B which is concerned with biomedical question answering (QA). We focus on factoid and list question, using an extractive QA model, that is, we restrict our system to output substrings of the provided text snippets. At the core of our system, we use FastQA, a state-of-the-art neural QA system. We extended it with biomedical word embeddings and changed its answer layer to be able to answer list questions in addition to factoid questions. We pre-trained the model on a large-scale open-domain QA dataset, SQuAD, and then fine-tuned the parameters on the BioASQ training set. With our approach, we achieve state-of-the-art results on factoid questions and competitive results on list questions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1706.08568,
  title  = {Neural Question Answering at BioASQ 5B},
  author = {Georg Wiese and Dirk Weissenborn and Mariana Neves},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.08568},
  year   = {2017}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T20:30:11.350Z