Biomedical question answering using semantic relations.

Journal: BMC bioinformatics
PMID:

Abstract

BACKGROUND: The proliferation of the scientific literature in the field of biomedicine makes it difficult to keep abreast of current knowledge, even for domain experts. While general Web search engines and specialized information retrieval (IR) systems have made important strides in recent decades, the problem of accurate knowledge extraction from the biomedical literature is far from solved. Classical IR systems usually return a list of documents that have to be read by the user to extract relevant information. This tedious and time-consuming work can be lessened with automatic Question Answering (QA) systems, which aim to provide users with direct and precise answers to their questions. In this work we propose a novel methodology for QA based on semantic relations extracted from the biomedical literature.

Authors

  • Dimitar Hristovski
    Faculty of Medicine, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
  • Dejan Dinevski
    Faculty of Medicine, University of Maribor, Maribor, Slovenia.
  • Andrej Kastrin
    Faculty of Information Studies, Novo mesto, Slovenia.
  • Thomas C Rindflesch
    National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD, USA.