Anthropomorphic Question Answering System for the -Omic Era

Michael A. Bauer1,2, Daniel Berleant1, Robert Belford1

1University of Arkansas at Little Rock
2University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences

INTRODUCTION RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS EXAMPLE CASE

An example interaction with the system:

In clinical and biomedical settings researchers use specialized search
engines to acquire answers to technical questions or to quickly get
verification of experimental results. The outcome of such queries result in
the reading and scanning of multiple Web pages and documents. Question
answering (QA) is a specialized type of information retrieval with the aim of
returning precise short answers to queries posed as natural language
questions. We propose a QA system that creates a dialog with the user that
mimics human interaction to answer biological questions supplemented with
multimedia information.
The system's architecture can be divided into four subsystems:
z Knowledge base - Create and maintain the knowledge base
z Question analyzer - Multiple software agents will find possible
answers to questions. A dialog established with the user can obtain
feedback to refine the query.
z Answer identifier - From those possible answers the most relevant
will be presented to the user.
z Answer presenter - Answers will be automatically marked up and
linked to semantically relevant content in other databases. The
additional information will be presented in a popup window that
appears when a marked term is clicked.
1)The user asks the system a question that is sent to each of the agents to
process in its own way.
2)In this case more information was needed to reduce the number of
possible answers so the system asked if the user could provide any
additional terms.
3)The additional information allows the system to find an answer that is
processed by the HyperGlossary.
4)4) The term ‘acetone’ was matched in the chosen glossary.
5)A definition of acetone is presented with a Spanish translation and the 3D
structure of the molecule.

1
BASIC SYSTEM

4 5

KEY FEATURES

z Query Formation - This is the process of building a query. The

user has an information need and creates an initial query either in
natural language or Boolean form. The query may be modified
further through the use of the knowledge space and dialog with the
user.
z Query Weighting - In this process weights are given to the terms
in the query. The weights are often identical to the weights given to
the terms in the document.
z Document Representation - This is the process by which the
documents are converted to a secondary representation. In this
process the tokens (words and phrases) are identified and indexed.
The tokens can be all the terms in a document or a subset based on a
controlled vocabulary.
z Term Document Weighting - Document representation tokens
are given a value relative to their perceived level of importance.
z Similarity Measure - The similarity measure is used to
determines similarity between the query and the document.
The multi-model approach takes advantage
of the fact that different models will
retrieve different subsets of the relevant
information for any particular
query/question.
Enhanced Answers CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS
The proposed system addresses two current requirement gaps in QA:
z Incorporating relevant multimedia information
z Ability to interact with the user
There is a lack of systems that allow the user to choose his or her
environment, establish context, have the system take that
information into account, and automatically return the appropriate
answer with relevant multimedia information. The QA system is
intended to return short answers to biological questions which will
Answers will be automatically marked up reduce the need to read entire documents.
and linked to semantically relevant content
In other databases using the
HyperGlossary.
This work is supported by the NSF Division of Undergraduate Education Award number
0840830 and the IDeA Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE) Program of the
National Center for Research Resources.