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Medical question answering (QA) systems have the potential to answer clinicians uncertainties about treatment and diagnosis on demand, informed by the latest evidence. However, despite the significant progress in general QA made by the NLP…

Recent advances in open-domain question answering (ODQA) have demonstrated impressive accuracy on standard Wikipedia style benchmarks. However, it is less clear how robust these models are and how well they perform when applied to…

We explore the suitability of unsupervised representation learning methods on biomedical text -- BioBERT, SciBERT, and BioSentVec -- for biomedical question answering. To further improve unsupervised representations for biomedical QA, we…

Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are a leading cause of global deaths, necessitating a focus on primary prevention and lifestyle behavior change. Health coaching, coupled with Question Answering (QA) systems, has the potential to transform…

In the era of digital healthcare, the huge volumes of textual information generated every day in hospitals constitute an essential but underused asset that could be exploited with task-specific, fine-tuned biomedical language representation…

This paper introduces a novel approach to enhancing closed-domain Question Answering (QA) systems, focusing on the specific needs of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL) Science Information Technology (ScienceIT) domain.…

Machine reading comprehension has made great progress in recent years owing to large-scale annotated datasets. In the clinical domain, however, creating such datasets is quite difficult due to the domain expertise required for annotation.…

In recent years, there is strong emphasis on mining medical data using machine learning techniques. A common problem is to obtain a noiseless set of textual documents, with a relevant content for the research question, and developing a…

Retrieval-augmented models have proven to be effective in natural language processing tasks, yet there remains a lack of research on their optimization using variational inference. We introduce the Variational Open-Domain (VOD) framework…

In the expanding field of language model applications, medical knowledge representation remains a significant challenge due to the specialized nature of the domain. Large language models, such as GPT-4, obtain reasonable scores on medical…

Practitioners deploying small open-weight large language models (LLMs) for medical question answering face a recurring design choice: invest in a domain-fine-tuned model, or keep a general-purpose model and inject domain knowledge at…

We introduce an approach for open-domain question answering (QA) that retrieves and reads a passage graph, where vertices are passages of text and edges represent relationships that are derived from an external knowledge base or…

State-of-the-art question answering (QA) models exhibit a variety of social biases (e.g., with respect to sex or race), generally explained by similar issues in their training data. However, what has been overlooked so far is that in the…

Past works that investigate out-of-domain performance of QA systems have mainly focused on general domains (e.g. news domain, wikipedia domain), underestimating the importance of subdomains defined by the internal characteristics of QA…

Question Answering (QA) is a task in natural language processing that has seen considerable growth after the advent of transformers. There has been a surge in QA datasets that have been proposed to challenge natural language processing…

There has been an influx of biomedical domain-specific language models, showing language models pre-trained on biomedical text perform better on biomedical domain benchmarks than those trained on general domain text corpora such as…

Machine Translation (MT) and Quality Estimation (QE) perform well in general domains but degrade under domain mismatch. This dissertation studies how to adapt MT and QE systems to specialized domains through a set of data-focused…

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic accentuated the need for access to biomedical literature to answer timely and disease-specific questions. During the early days of the pandemic, one of the biggest challenges we faced was the lack of…

Question answering (QA) systems for large document collections typically use pipelines that (i) retrieve possibly relevant documents, (ii) re-rank them, (iii) rank paragraphs or other snippets of the top-ranked documents, and (iv) select…

Weakly-supervised table question-answering(TableQA) models have achieved state-of-art performance by using pre-trained BERT transformer to jointly encoding a question and a table to produce structured query for the question. However, in…