Ontology-Based Retrieval & Neural Approaches for BioASQ Ideal Answer Generation

The ever-increasing magnitude of biomedical information sources makes it difficult and time-consuming for a human researcher to find the most relevant documents and pinpointed answers for a specific question or topic when using only a traditional search engine. Biomedical Question Answering systems automatically identify the most relevant documents and pinpointed answers, given an information need expressed as a natural language question. Generating a non-redundant, human-readable summary that satisfies the information need of a given biomedical question is the focus of the Ideal Answer Generation task, part of the BioASQ challenge. This paper presents a system for ideal answer generation (using ontology-based retrieval and a neural learning-to-rank approach, combined with extractive and abstractive summarization techniques) which achieved the highest ROUGE score of 0.659 on the BioASQ 5b batch 2 test.