BioinQA: Addressing bottlenecks of Biomedical Domain through Biomedical Question Answering System
Sparsh Mittal, Saket Kumar Gupta, Ankush Mittal, Sumit Bhatia · 2008
Recent advances in the realm of biomedicine and genetics in the post genomics era have resulted in an explosion in the amount of biomedical literature available. Large textbanks comprising of thousands of full-text biology papers are rapidly becoming available. Due to gigantic volumes of information available and lack of efficient and domain specific information retrieval tools, it has become extremely difficult to extract the relevant information from the large repositories of data. While the specialized information retrieval tools are not suitable for beginners, general purpose search engines are not intelligent enough to respond to domain specific questions, predominantly of the Medical, Bioinformatics or related fields. In this paper, we present an intelligent question answering system that efficiently and quickly responds to the questions of novices in natural language and is smart enough to answer questions of advanced users (researchers). It employs various natural language processing techniques to answer user questions even from multiple documents. The system also makes use of metadata knowledge for addressing specific biomedical domain concerns like heterogeneity, acronyms, etc.