# CO-Search: COVID-19 Information Retrieval with Semantic Search, Question Answering, and Abstractive Summarization

Source: [CO-Search: COVID-19 Information Retrieval with Semantic Search, Question Answering, and Abstractive Summarization](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa67c71e209131cea18421>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-25T22:21:05.859Z

Authors: Andre Esteva, Anuprit Kale, Romain Paulus, Kazuma Hashimoto, Wenpeng Yin, Dragomir Radev, Richard Socher

Published: 2020-06-17T01:32:48.000Z

## Abstract

The COVID-19 global pandemic has resulted in international efforts to understand, track, and mitigate the disease, yielding a significant corpus of COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2-related publications across scientific disciplines. As of May 2020, 128,000 coronavirus-related publications have been collected through the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset Challenge. Here we present CO-Search, a retriever-ranker semantic search engine designed to handle complex queries over the COVID-19 literature, potentially aiding overburdened health workers in finding scientific answers during a time of crisis. The retriever is built from a Siamese-BERT encoder that is linearly composed with a TF-IDF vectorizer, and reciprocal-rank fused with a BM25 vectorizer. The ranker is composed of a multi-hop question-answering module, that together with a multi-paragraph abstractive summarizer adjust retriever scores. To account for the domain-specific and relatively limited dataset, we generate a bipartite graph of document paragraphs and citations, creating 1.3 million (citation title, paragraph) tuples for training the encoder. We evaluate our system on the data of the TREC-COVID information retrieval challenge. CO-Search obtains top performance on the datasets of the first and second rounds, across several key metrics: normalized discounted cumulative gain, precision, mean average precision, and binary preference.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.09595>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.09595.pdf>)