Abstract
The recent success of question answering systems is largely attributed to pre-trained language models. However, as language models are mostly pre-trained on general domain corpora such as Wikipedia, they often have difficulty in understanding biomedical questions. In this paper, we investigate the performance of BioBERT, a pre-trained biomedical language model, in answering biomedical questions including factoid, list, and yes/no type questions. BioBERT uses almost the same structure across various question types and achieved the best performance in the 7th BioASQ Challenge (Task 7b, Phase B). BioBERT pre-trained on SQuAD or SQuAD 2.0 easily outperformed previous state-of-the-art models. BioBERT obtains the best performance when it uses the appropriate pre-/post-processing strategies for questions, passages, and answers.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Title of host publication | Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases - International Workshops of ECML PKDD 2019, Proceedings |
Editors | Peggy Cellier, Kurt Driessens |
Publisher | Springer |
Pages | 727-740 |
Number of pages | 14 |
ISBN (Print) | 9783030438869 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2020 |
Event | 19th Joint European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, ECML PKDD 2019 - Wurzburg, Germany Duration: 2019 Sept 16 → 2019 Sept 20 |
Publication series
Name | Communications in Computer and Information Science |
---|---|
Volume | 1168 CCIS |
ISSN (Print) | 1865-0929 |
ISSN (Electronic) | 1865-0937 |
Conference
Conference | 19th Joint European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, ECML PKDD 2019 |
---|---|
Country/Territory | Germany |
City | Wurzburg |
Period | 19/9/16 → 19/9/20 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
Keywords
- Biomedical question answering
- Pre-trained language model
- Transfer learning
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Computer Science
- General Mathematics