AUTOMATED QUESTION-ANSWERING TECHNIQUES
AND THE MEDICAL DOMAIN
Andrea Andrenucci
Department of Computer and System Sciences, Stockholm University/ Royal Institute of Technology
Forum 100, SE-16440, Kista, Sweden
Keywords: Automated Question Answering, Natural Language Interfaces, Medical Applications.
Abstract: The question-answering (QA) paradigm, i.e. the process of retrieving precise answers to natural language
(NL) questions, was introduced in late 1960-ies and early 1970-ies within the framework of Artificial
Intelligence. The advent of WWW and the need to provide advanced, user-friendly search tools has
extended the QA paradigm to a larger audience of people and a larger number of fields, including medicine.
This paper reviews and compares three main question-answering approaches based on Natural Language
Processing, Information Retrieval, and question templates, eliciting their differences and the context of
application that best suits each of them within the medical domain.
1 INTRODUCTION
The question-answering (QA) paradigm, i.e. the
process of retrieving precise answers to natural
language (NL) questions, was introduced in late
1960-ies and early 1970-ies within the framework of
Artificial Intelligence. From the beginning it was
mainly an academic research field and there were
hardly any commercially applicable QA
applications. The advent of WWW and the need to
provide advanced, user-friendly search tools has
extended the QA paradigm to a larger audience of
people and a larger number of fields, including
medicine, since medical content is one of the most
retrieved types of information on the WWW.
This paper discusses which of three major QA
approaches, i.e. deep Natural Language Processing
(NLP), Information Retrieval (IR) enhanced by
shallow NLP, and Template-based QA, better fit
medical applications, eliciting their context of
pertinence. To our knowledge, this is the first formal
comparison of the three QA approaches that focuses
on the medical domain.
The next three sections discuss the approaches
and provide some examples of their application in
the medical domain; section five and six pinpoints
the application areas that fit each technique.
2 NATURAL LANGUAGE
PROCESSING (NLP)
A common feature of deep NLP systems is that they
convert text input into formal representation of
meaning such as logic (first order predicate
calculus), semantic networks, conceptual
dependency diagrams, or frame-based
representations (Jurafsky and Martin, 2000, p. 502).
In other words deep NLP systems perform a
semantic analysis of text in NL. Semantic analysis is
the process of studying the meaning of a linguistic
input and giving a formal representation of it.
Jurafsky and Martin (2000, p. 548) provide a
possible approach for semantic analysis (see figure 1
on the next page): the user input is first passed
through a syntactic parser, whose output,
represented with a parse tree, is then processed by a
semantic analyzer which delivers a meaning
representation.
A medical QA system that implements this
approach is the ExtrAns system (Rinaldi et al.,
2004). The system derives logical representations of
both user questions and the documents in the
collection. The documents are analysed in an off-
line stage and their semantic form is stored in a
Database. In an on-line stage user questions are
converted into their semantic representation, prior to
being compared to the representations of the
documents in the matching process. When a match
207
Andrenucci A. (2008).
AUTOMATED QUESTION-ANSWERING TECHNIQUES AND THE MEDICAL DOMAIN.
In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Health Informatics, pages 207-212
Copyright
c
SciTePress
occurs, the sentences that originated the match are
extracted as possible answers to the user question.
Figure 1: The steps in Semantic Analysis.
Drawbacks of the deep NLP approach are its
computational intensiveness and its high processing
time (Andrenucci and Sneiders, 2005, Rinaldi et al.,
2004) as well portability difficulties (Andrenucci
and Sneiders, 2005, Hartrumpf 2006). Figure 2
(Androutsopoulos, Ritchie, and Thanisch, 1995)
shows the possible architecture of a typical deep
NLP QA system. Six components (linguistic front-
end) change when the input language changes, and
three components (domain-dependent knowledge)
change when the knowledge domain changes. The
domain dependent knowledge contains information
specific for the domain of interest: a lexicon and a
world model. The lexicon contains admissible
vocabulary words from the knowledge domain. The
world model describes the structure of the domain of
interest, i.e. the hierarchy of classes of the domain
objects, plus the properties and the constraints that
characterize the relationship between them. The
linguistic front-end parses and analyses the user
input in NL.
syntax rules
semantic
rules
lexicon
world model
mapping to
DB info
parser
semantic
interpreter
parse tree
DB query
generator
DB management
sys tem
res ponse
generator
NL input
res ponse
logical query
DB query
retrieved results
linguistic
front-end
domain-
dependent
knowledge
DB
syntax rules
semantic
rules
lexicon
world model
mapping to
DB info
parser
semantic
interpreter
parse tree
DB query
generator
DB management
sys tem
res ponse
generator
NL input
res ponse
logical query
DB query
retrieved results
linguistic
front-end
domain-
dependent
knowledge
DB
Figure 2: Architecture of a typical deep NLP system,
originally from Androutsopoulos et al., 1995.
3 INFORMATION RETRIEVAL
(IR) AND SHALLOW NLP
IR has evolved from document retrieval systems to
passage retrieval systems, which focus on retrieving
text passages rather than entire documents. Answers
are extracted with the help of shallow NLP, which
does not imply text understanding, i.e. semantic
analysis of NL input. Instead it focuses on extracting
text chunks, matching patterns or entities that
contain the answer to user questions. For instance in
a question like “Who discovered the polio
vaccine?”, the presence of the interrogative pronoun
“who” implies the extraction of an entity of type
“person name” associated with the keywords,
“discovered”, ”polio”, ”vaccine”.
This approach has been implemented in several
biomedical systems. Rindflesch et al. (2000) utilized
named entity recognition techniques to identify
drugs and genes in biomedical documents, then the
keywords which connect them (predicates). Craven
and Kumlien (1999) utilized “bag of words” at the
sentence level, to extract relations between proteins
and drugs from the information stored in Medline
articles (MEDLINE, 2006).
The IR approach is more domain-independent
than traditional NLP, but requires the answer to be
explicitly present in the text (Voorhees, 2001).
Furthermore answers retrieved with IR techniques
are less justified by the context, since they only
focus on extracting text snippets containing words
that are present in the user question (Laurent,
Seguela and Negre, 2006).
This approach is typical for information
extraction and is largely used in the Text REtrieval
Conferences (Voorhees, 2001), which aim at
comparing QA systems that retrieve mainly factoid
questions. Several systems that implement the
shallow NLP approach exploit data redundancy
(Brill et al., 2001), i.e. a number of text passages that
contain similar statements, in order to find reliable
answers. For example Sekimizu, Park and Tsujii
(1998) exploits domain specific verbs, which occur
frequently in MEDLINE abstracts, in order to locate
the biomedical terms that are respectively subject
and object terms for the verbs, and thereafter classify
their relations (e.g. Protein X regulates Protein Y).
Similarly Spasic, Nenadic, and Ananiadou (2003)
measure frequent co-occurrences of biomedical
verbs with unclassified terms in order to extract
domain specific terms.
A medical search system that implements both
IR techniques and deeper NLP techniques is
PERSIVAL (McKeown et al., 2001). The system
Input
Parse
Tree
Syntactic
Parser
Output
Semantic
Representation
Semantic
Analyser
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supports user search and summarization of medical
information with the help of representations of
medical texts and patient records. The system
processes medical documents with part of speech
tools and with a finite state grammar (that regulates
syntactic constraints) in order to extract multi-word
terms. This step is similar to the syntactic analysis
provided with the help of syntax rules in fig. 2.
Also similarly to the deep NLP approach, this
system utilizes a well defined world model (see
section 2), provided by the UMLS medical
knowledge base (McCray and Nelson, 1995), in
order to define the semantic category and the level
of specificity of the extracted terms. This is a kind of
semantic analysis.
The user profiles and the medical documents are
represented with vectors, which are typical IR
representation models. The vectors enclose the
semantic categories of the medical terms and their
associated values. The representations are then
compared calculating the cosine similarity of the
vectors (Salton and Buckley, 1988), which is also a
typical IR technique. Tests conducted with the
system (Teufel et al., 2001) have shown that the
semantic analysis enhances precision and recall of
the system, compared to standard IR techniques.
4 TEMPLATE-BASED
APPROACH
Template-based QA extends the pattern matching
approach and exploits a collection of manually
created question templates, i.e. questions which have
open concepts to be filled with data instances,
mapped into the conceptual model of the knowledge
domain. The templates generally cover the most
frequently asked questions (FAQs) of the domain
(Sneiders, 2002b), and can be either static, where
each template is a question linked to a piece of static
text, or dynamic and parameterized if they cover a
structured database (Sneiders, 2002a). A question
template is viewed as a predicate with variable and
fixed parameters:
data
1
,…data
n
:Q(fixed
1
,…fixed
m
,variable
1
,…
variable
n
)
During the process of matching a template to a user
question, the fixed parameters (fixed
1
,…fixed
m
) are
bound to the user question. If there are database data
instances (data
1
,…data
n
) that fit the variable
parameters (variable
1
, …variable
n
) and make the
statement Q true, then these data instances constitute
the answer. This approach has been utilized on a
medical portal aiming at providing cross language
QA in matters of psychology and psychotherapy
(http://www.web4health.info).
A similar approach, which focuses on classifying
user questions with the help of pre-determined
semantic patterns, is applied in a feasibility study for
creating a QA prototype for the oral surgery domain
(Jacquemart and Zweigenbaum, 2003). The patterns
are created with triples that contain two concepts
and their relation (Concept A – Relation – Concept
B). The relation between the concepts is defined
with the help of the UMLS Semantic Network
(McCray and Nelson, 1995).
The Medline Button system (Cimino et al., 1992)
tries to automate the question generation process
creating semantic patterns of concepts that occur
frequently in user questions. The system then
instantiates the generic concepts in the templates
with terms that are specific for the search context
and user interests. For instance the template “Does
<procedure> cause <disease>?” is instantiated to
“Does chest x-rays causes cancer?” if the user is
interested in those topics.
The PICO-format (Sackett et al., 2004), utilized
in several medical QA systems (Niu et al., 2003,
Demner-Fushman and Lin, 2005), consists of
templates that classifies NL input with the help of a
conceptual structure that represent the key elements
of clinical questions: Problem (the primary problem
of the patient), Intervention (medication or
therapeutic procedure), Comparison (of the actual
intervention to other possible interventions) and
Outcome (the effect of the intervention).
A system that implements IR and templates-
based techniques is the EPoCare QA system (Niu et
al., 2003). Candidate answers are first retrieved with
standard IR techniques and then classified with the
PICO format, prior to being matched to PICO-
formatted user questions. The system also tries to
classify the relations between the PICO conceptual
units, for instance individuating cause-effect
relations between interventions and outcomes.
5 QA TECHNIQUES
AND THE MEDICAL
DOMAIN - DISCUSSION
As mentioned in section 3, the IR approach
distinguish the expected answer type (e.g. person,
place or time) with the help of the so-called “wh-
words” in the user question (e.g. who, where, when).
Niu et al. (2003) states that this classification is not
AUTOMATED QUESTION-ANSWERING TECHNIQUES AND THE MEDICAL DOMAIN
209
appropriate for the medical domain for the following
reasons:
1) Questions about patient care usually deal with
diagnosis, treatments, prognosis and outcome of the
treatments (Richardson et al., 1995). This require a
methodology for identifying answer types that is
different from the traditional approach utilized for
generic “factoid” QA systems.
2) Answers to “when”-questions in medical area are
usually related to relative time (Q: “When should I
eat my medicine?” A: “One hour before lunch”)
rather than absolute time/dates, which is typical for
generic QA systems (Q: “When was America
discovered?” A: “1492”), or address a clinical
condition (Q: “When should I see a therapist?” A:
“You should consider professional advice if your
personal problems are affecting your quality of life
and social functions at work or at home for more
than a month”). This requires a deeper semantic
interpretation of the user question.
3) Yes-no questions, i.e. questions that require yes or
no answer (e.g. “Is cognitive behaviour a good
therapy method for a person suffering from anxiety
disorder?”) are not considered by systems that focus
on “wh”-questions.
Furthermore IR techniques extract answers
containing words that are present in user questions,
without considering contextual information in the
text that could be relevant to provide and justify
answers (Niu and Hirst, 2004, Laurent, Seguela and
Negre, 2006). In medical applications correct
answers may be missed or incorrect answers may be
retrieved if contextual information is not understood,
since the context may provide more evidence, clarify
or even contradict the extracted snippets (Niu et al.,
2003).
Deep NLP-based and Template based QA are the
techniques that better fit QA in medical matters.
Both approaches handle more advanced types of
questions that implies understanding of their context,
such as yes-no questions, and have shown better
results when it comes to requests for “advice-giving”
(e.g. “How to…” questions) since they perform a
semantic interpretation of user input (Andrenucci
and Sneiders, 2005, Laurent, Seguela and Negre,
2006). For example semantic analysis proved to
improve the disambiguation of causal questions that
involves reasoning (e.g. “How does cancer
develop?”) and the precision results of question
answering (Girju, 2003).
In the template based approach the interpretation
is done manually, individuating for each single
template the concepts that cover a part of the
conceptual model of the knowledge domain. In the
NLP approach the interpretation is done
automatically by the system as questions are asked,
mapping user questions and candidate answers into a
formal semantic representation.
Unlike IR enhanced by shallow NLP, those
techniques do not rely on data redundancy, which is
more likely to be useful in large, open domains
(Molla et al., 2003). Information in restricted
domains, such as the medical one, is usually well
structured and it is unlikely that answers to the same
question are redundantly present in several places of
the information source (Niu et al., 2003). Deep NLP
and Template based QA are the techniques that are
more often utilized to form interfaces to structured
data (Andrenucci and Sneiders, 2005).
However there are some important differences
that determine the context of application of the two
afore-mentioned techniques. The NLP approach
provides a natural flow in the user-computer
dialogue that resembles human-to-human
communication, thanks to the implementation of
realistic discourse planning models; see for instance
(Buchanan et al., 1995). NLP-based systems may
also implement dialectical argumentation techniques
in order to be more persuasive while giving advice
in health matters. One example is the DAPHNE
system (Cawsey, Grasso, and Jones, 1999), which
provides advice for the promotion of healthy
nutrition and implements a persuasive
conversational model based on providing supports
for its claims (“People who eat more fruit have less
diseases”) and anticipating possible counter
arguments and exceptions (“Although you may not
like all types of vegetables…”).
So in dialoguing or counselling matters that have
to resemble the patient-doctor communication, the
NLP approach is preferable. The NLP-approach also
delivers more reliable answers in comparison to the
other approaches (Andrenucci and Sneiders, 2005,
Molla et al., 2003, Teufel et al., 2001). For example
in Power Answer (Moldovan et al, 2003), the best
performing system for TREC 2004 and 2005, a logic
proof based on abductive justifications is performed
among the candidate answers prior to presenting the
valid answers to the users, enhancing the quality and
reliability of the results. Power Answer achieved an
accuracy of 70% while other medical systems
implementing approaches similar to the template
based approach achieved 60% (Jacquemart and
Zweigenbaum, 2003) of accuracy. Among IR
systems, Persival (McKeown et al., 2001) achieved
precision results that varied between 65 % and 89 %,
however IR techniques were supported by syntactic
and semantic analysis.
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So in cases where the reliability of the answers is
vital, systems enhanced by NLP approach are
preferable; for instance medical systems that support
practitioners in their decision making process and
that provide evidence for the suggested answers (Lin
and Demner-Fushman, 2005); the so-called
evidence-based medicine (Sackett et al., 2000).
A major drawback of this approach is that
development and maintenance of NLP systems are
complex and require highly qualified personnel such
as programmers, knowledge engineers and database
administrators. For example when the NLP QA
needs to be adapted to multi-lingual environment,
changes needs to be applied to the whole linguistic
module, which includes the lexicon, the world
model, the semantic interpreter and the syntactic
parser (Androutsopoulos, Ritchie, and Thanisch,
1995). Another drawback is that this approach is
computationally intensive and requires high
processing time, which makes it difficult to adapt it
to the Web (Rinaldi et al., 2004, Hartrumpf, 2006).
Template-based question answering is the most
viable approach when it comes to medical
information portals on the Web (Andrenucci and
Sneiders, 2005). This is due to the following
characteristics: 1) its suitability to support multi-
lingual content, 2) the relatively easiness of
maintenance, 3) its capacity to solve linguistic
ambiguities such as word sense disambiguation
without computationally expensive software, 4) and
its capability to return answers in different formats.
The suitability to support content in several
languages has a simple explanation: user questions
are matched against question templates that match
different interpretations of the same question and
contain individual lexicons; this implies that it is
only necessary to change individual templates to get
a multi-lingual matching.
Template-based QA systems are also easier to
manage since they do not require rare skills: the
administrator must only have knowledge of the
subject domain and possess basic linguistic skills
(Sneiders, 2002a).
Thanks to the usage of multiple lexicons, i.e.
small individual lexicons attached to each template,
linguistic ambiguities are solved at the micro-level
rather than at the macro-level. Small lexicons
identify mutually exchangeable words (synonyms
and their grammatical forms) for every concept
within the narrow context of a given template/
document, rather than in the context of the whole
knowledge domain (Sneiders, 2002a), which is
typical for the deep NLP approach. This makes the
individuation of word meanings in different contexts
an easier and less error-prone process (Sneiders,
2002b, p. 262).
The template-based approach supports also the
retrieval of answers in a variety of multimedia
forms, such as spoken languages, audio-files and
imagery (Andrenucci and Sneiders, 2005, McKeown
et al. 2001).
The Template based approach has a high recall
level, which fits users who are interested in
retrieving complete sets of answers rather than few
very precise answers.
A drawback of this approach is that manual
creation of the templates is required. This is a
tedious process, which poses great consistency
demands among the persons who create the
templates. Another drawback is that the template-
based QA does not provide a natural flow in
user/system dialogue or provides dialogues of poor
quality. One of the first medical systems trying to
use templates while dialoguing with users was Eliza
(Weizenbaum, 1966), a conversational agent created
to simulate the responses of a psychotherapist. The
system did not contain any domain knowledge and
the templates utilized regular expression in order to
match user input and to create responses that
exploited keywords from the input sentences. This
resulted often in nonsense answers and nonsense
dialogues (Copeland, 1993).
6 CONCLUSIONS
This paper has discussed three main techniques
within QA and has pointed out the approaches that
are more suitable for medical applications: the deep
NLP approach and the template based approach.
The template based approach is the most viable
commercially and fits Web-based medical
applications that are aimed at retrieving multilingual
content in different multimedia formats. Its high
recall level makes it the technique that fits users who
are more interested in retrieving complete sets of
answers rather than few very precise answers.
The deep NLP approach provides a dialogue that
better resembles the human-to-human conversation
and also delivers more reliable answers. It fits areas
where the precision of the retrieved information is
crucial, e.g. in decision-support or evidence-based
medicine.
IR enhanced by shallow NLP is more appropriate
as a search tool for larger or open domains as the
Web, since it exploits data redundancy. However it
can mainly retrieve factual answers unlike the NLP
and the template based approaches, which support
more complex types of questions such as requests
for “advice-giving”.
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211
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