2019/09/18 by Wonjin Yoon, Yoon, Wonjin, Jinhyuk Lee +7 · 1 citation
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Computer Science · #Biomedical Text Mining and Ontologies #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Topic Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1909.08229
openalex publication_date 2019/09/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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.