WS4A: a Biomedical Question and Answering System based on public Web Services and Ontologies
This work addresses biomedical information retrieval for researchers and practitioners, but it is incremental as it builds on existing web services without introducing major methodological breakthroughs.
The authors tackled biomedical question answering by developing WS4A, a system that leverages existing web services and ontologies for tasks like concept retrieval and annotation, achieving second place in two subtasks of the BioASQ 2016 challenge with reported precision, recall, and f-measure values.
This paper describes our system, dubbed WS4A (Web Services for All), that participated in the fourth edition of the BioASQ challenge (2016). We used WS4A to perform the Question and Answering (QA) task 4b, which consisted on the retrieval of relevant concepts, documents, snippets, RDF triples, exact answers and ideal answers for each given question. The novelty in our approach consists on the maximum exploitation of existing web services in each step of WS4A, such as the annotation of text, and the retrieval of metadata for each annotation. The information retrieved included concept identifiers, ontologies, ancestors, and most importantly, PubMed identifiers. The paper describes the WS4A pipeline and also presents the precision, recall and f-measure values obtained in task 4b. Our system achieved two second places in two subtasks on one of the five batches.