Improving Health Question Answering with Reliable and Time-Aware
  Evidence Retrieval
Juraj Vladika Florian Matthes
In today's digital world, seeking answers to health questions on the Internet
is a common practice. However, existing question answering (QA) systems often
rely on using pre-selected and annotated evidence documents, thus making them
inadequate for addressing novel questions. Our study focuses on the open-domain
QA setting, where the key challenge is to first uncover relevant evidence in
large knowledge bases. By utilizing the common retrieve-then-read QA pipeline
and PubMed as a trustworthy collection of medical research documents, we answer
health questions from three diverse datasets. We modify different retrieval
settings to observe their influence on the QA pipeline's performance, including
the number of retrieved documents, sentence selection process, the publication
year of articles, and their number of citations. Our results reveal that
cutting down on the amount of retrieved documents and favoring more recent and
highly cited documents can improve the final macro F1 score up to 10%. We
discuss the results, highlight interesting examples, and outline challenges for
future research, like managing evidence disagreement and crafting user-friendly
explanations.