Question answering (QA) is a task in the field of natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval, which has pivotal applications in areas such as online reading comprehension and web search engines. Currently, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and its biomedical variation (BioBERT) achieve impressive results on the reading comprehension QA datasets and medical-related QA datasets, and so they are widely used for a variety of passage-based QA tasks. However, their performances rapidly deteriorate when encountering passage and context ambiguities. This issue is prevalent and unavoidable in many fields, notably the web-based medical field. In this paper, we introduced a novel approach called the Multiple Synonymous Questions BioBERT (MSQ-BioBERT), which integrates question augmentation, rather than the typical single question used by traditional BioBERT, to elevate BioBERT’s performance on medical QA tasks. In addition, we constructed an ambiguous medical dataset based on the information from Wikipedia web. Experiments with both this web-based constructed medical dataset and open biomedical datasets demonstrate the significant performance gains of the MSQ-BioBERT approach, showcasing a new method for addressing ambiguity in medical QA tasks.

Since the first identified case of COVID-19 in December 2019, a plethora of pharmaceuticals and therapeutics have been tested for COVID-19 treatment. While medical advancements and breakthroughs are well underway, the sheer number of studies, treatments, and associated reports makes it extremely challenging to keep track of the rapidly growing COVID-19 research landscape. While existing scientific literature search systems provide basic document retrieval, they fundamentally lack the ability to explore data, and in addition, do not help develop a deeper understanding of COVID-19 related clinical experiments and findings. As research expands, results do so as well, resulting in a position that is complicated and overwhelming. To address this issue, we present a named entity recognition based framework that accurately extracts COVID-19 related information from clinical test results articles, and generates an efficient and interactive visual knowledge graph. This knowledge graph platform is user friendly, and provides intuitive and convenient tools to explore and analyze COVID-19 research data and results including medicinal performances, side effects and target populations.