Intelligent Ontology based Question Answering System for Medical Domain
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Date
2011
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Uva Wellassa University of Srilanka
Abstract
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Irrespective of the domain, the main aim of a Question Answering system is getting a question from the user, comprehending it, searching the answer in an efficient way and presenting the answers to the user. Many methods have been devised for this purpose. This basic idea is using ontology for representing the knowledge and developing the knowledge base. Although the ultimate aim of question answering is finding the exact answer to any question in any context. In today's world of automated content processing, this is inherently a hard task because without a restriction imposed either on the question type or on the user's vocabulary, the question answering process gets a big hit even at the question interpretation phase. The published medical literature and online medical resources are important sources to help physicians make decisions in patient treatment Cimino et al., 2003.
Question answering is a rapid-developing technique that automatically analyses thousands of articles to generate a short text, ideally, in less than a few seconds, to answer questions posed by physicians. Such a technique provides a practical alternative that allows physicians to efficiently seek information at point of patient care. Physicians usually have limited time to browse the retrieved information. For example, studies found that physicians spend on average two minutes or less seeking an answer to a question, and that if a search takes longer, it is likely to be abandoned (Radomski, 1986). Although there are a number of annotated medical knowledge databases available for physicians to use, studies found that most of the resources are not frequently used by physicians in large hospitals due to busy work schedule in their lives (Sackett et al., 2000). Physicians often need to consult literature for the latest information in patient care (Siang et al,. 2001). Information retrieval systems (e.g., PubMed) are frequently used by physicians. Another evaluation study showed that it took an average of more than 30 minutes for a healthcare provider to search for answer from the PubMed, which means "information seeking is practical only 'after hours' and not in the clinical setting" (Wikipedia, 2010).
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Keywords
Health Science, Computer Science