BioASQ and PubAnnotation : Using linked annotations in biomedical question answering

Motivation: The motivation for this proposal is to extrinsically evaluate the resources available in PubAnnotation and investigate the potential of this repository as an external component of systems with direct real-world biomedical applications, in particular biomedical question answering. Approach: In this regard, we propose to adjust biomedical question answering systems to take advantage of linked annotations available in PubAnnotation. Those systems can be used to answer biomedical questions from benchmark datasets of the BioASQ challenge, with and without using additional annotations from PubAnnotation. Apart from annotations on relevant biomedical literature, we could also use annotations on benchmark questions through the same repository. Using the BioASQ evaluation infrastructure we can compare the performance of system versions using different resources. Therefore, we can assess the effect of using linked annotations in answering biomedical questions, corresponding to real information needs of biomedical experts.