| Year: 2006 | 
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| LHNCBC-2006-032 |
| Situated Question Answering in the Clinical Domain: Selecting the Best Drug Treatment for Diseases |
| Demner-Fushman D, Lin J |
| Proceedings of COLING/ACL 2006 Workshop on Task-Focused Summarization and Question Answering, July 2006, Sydney, Australia |
| Unlike open-domain factoid questions, clinical information needs arise within the rich context of patient treatment. This environment establishes a number of constraints on the design of systems aimed at physicians in real-world settings. In this paper, we describe a clinical question answering system that focuses on a class of commonly-occurring questions: 'What is the best drug treatment for X?', where X can be any disease. To evaluate our system, we built a test collection consisting of thirty randomly-selected diseases from an existing secondary source. Both an automatic and a manual evaluation demonstrate that our system compares favorably to PubMed, the search system most commonly-used by physicians today. |
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