Transformer-Based Open Domain Biomedical Question Answering at BioASQ8 Challenge

BioASQ task B focuses on biomedical information retrieval and question answering. This paper describes the participation and proposed solutions of our team. We build a system based on recent advances in the general domain as well as the approaches from previous years of the competition. We adapt a system based on a pretrained BERT for document and snippet retrieval, question answering and summarization. We describe all approaches we experimented with and show that while neural approaches do well, sometimes baseline approaches have high automatic metrics. The proposed system achieves competitive performance while being general so that it can be applied to other domains as well.

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