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A framework of a logic-based question-answering system for the medical domain (LOQAS-Med)

Published: 08 March 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Question-answering systems that provide precise answers to questions, by combining techniques for information retrieval, information extraction, and natural language processing, are seen as the next-generation search engines. Due to the growth and real-world impact of biomedical information, the need for question-answering systems that can aid medical researchers and health care professionals in their information search is acutely felt. In order to provide users with accurate answers, such systems need to go beyond lexico-syntactic analysis to semantic analysis and processing of texts and knowledge resources. Moreover, question-answering systems equipped with reasoning capabilities can derive more adequate answers by using inference. Research on question answering in the medical and health care domain is still in its inception stage. While several recent approaches to medical question answering have explored use of semantic knowledge, few approaches have exploited the utility of logic formalisms and of inference mechanisms. In this paper, we present a framework for a logic-based question-answering system for the medical domain, which uses Description Logic as the formalism for knowledge representation and reasoning. As a first step toward building the proposed system, we present semantic analysis and classification of medical questions.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SAC '09: Proceedings of the 2009 ACM symposium on Applied Computing
March 2009
2347 pages
ISBN:9781605581668
DOI:10.1145/1529282
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 08 March 2009

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Author Tags

  1. biomedical informatics
  2. description logics
  3. natural language processing
  4. question answering
  5. semantic text mining

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SAC09
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SAC09: The 2009 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
March 8, 2009 - March 12, 2008
Hawaii, Honolulu

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,650 of 6,669 submissions, 25%

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Survey on the Biomedical Text Summarization Techniques with an Emphasis on Databases, Techniques, Semantic Approaches, Classification Techniques, and Similarity MeasuresSustainability10.3390/su1505421615:5(4216)Online publication date: 26-Feb-2023
  • (2023)An Semantic Similarity Matching Method for Chinese Medical Question TextHealth Information Processing10.1007/978-981-19-9865-2_6(82-94)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2023
  • (2019)Defining, Understanding, and Addressing Big DataWeb Services10.4018/978-1-5225-7501-6.ch004(39-74)Online publication date: 2019
  • (2019)Chinese medical question answer selection via hybrid models based on CNN and GRUMultimedia Tools and Applications10.1007/s11042-019-7240-1Online publication date: 1-Mar-2019
  • (2016)Defining, Understanding, and Addressing Big DataInternational Journal of Business Analytics10.4018/IJBAN.20160401013:2(1-32)Online publication date: Apr-2016
  • (2016)Natural Language Processing: Applications in Pediatric ResearchPediatric Biomedical Informatics10.1007/978-981-10-1104-7_12(231-250)Online publication date: 9-Oct-2016
  • (2013)R/questProceedings of the 10th International Conference on Flexible Query Answering Systems - Volume 813210.1007/978-3-642-40769-7_7(79-90)Online publication date: 18-Sep-2013
  • (2012)An ontology for clinical questions about the contents of patient notesJournal of Biomedical Informatics10.1016/j.jbi.2011.11.00845:2(292-306)Online publication date: Apr-2012
  • (2012)Natural Language Processing: Applications in Pediatric ResearchPediatric Biomedical Informatics10.1007/978-94-007-5149-1_10(173-192)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2012
  • (2012)Contextual question answering for the health domainJournal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology10.1002/asi.2273363:11(2313-2327)Online publication date: 30-Oct-2012

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