A knowledge based method for the medical question answering problem

Abstract

In this paper, a restricted domain question answering (QA) system is described. The design architecture of this QA system and the features that allow the adaptation of the QA system to the medical domain are also presented. The advantages of this QA system include the simple process of defining the question taxonomy answered by the system as well as the possibility of locally or remotely managed document collections. The main computing methods of the QA system are based on the application of natural language processing (NLP) techniques to infer the logic forms and on the treatment of the logic forms. The knowledge of the system is acquired through the use of two different resources: Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) to handle the medical terminology and WordNet to manage the open-domain terminology.