# Transferability of Natural Language Inference to Biomedical Question Answering Source: [Transferability of Natural Language Inference to Biomedical Question Answering]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-25T22:56:51.523Z Authors: Minbyul Jeong, Mujeen Sung, Gangwoo Kim, Donghyeon Kim, Wonjin Yoon, Jaehyo Yoo, Jaewoo Kang Published: 2020-07-01T04:05:48.000Z ## Abstract Biomedical question answering (QA) is a challenging task due to the scarcity of data and the requirement of domain expertise. Pre-trained language models have been used to address these issues. Recently, learning relationships between sentence pairs has been proved to improve performance in general QA. In this paper, we focus on applying BioBERT to transfer the knowledge of natural language inference (NLI) to biomedical QA. We observe that BioBERT trained on the NLI dataset obtains better performance on Yes/No (+5.59%), Factoid (+0.53%), List type (+13.58%) questions compared to performance obtained in a previous challenge (BioASQ 7B Phase B). We present a sequential transfer learning method that significantly performed well in the 8th BioASQ Challenge (Phase B). In sequential transfer learning, the order in which tasks are fine-tuned is important. We measure an unanswerable rate of the extractive QA setting when the formats of factoid and list type questions are converted to the format of the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD). ## 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]() [PDF]()