# Where Was COVID-19 First Discovered? Designing a Question-Answering System for Pandemic Situations Source: [Where Was COVID-19 First Discovered? Designing a Question-Answering System for Pandemic Situations]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-26T00:07:48.255Z Authors: Johannes Graf, Gino Lancho, Patrick Zschech, Kai Heinrich Published: 2022-04-19T10:15:51.000Z ## Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic is accompanied by a massive "infodemic" that makes it hard to identify concise and credible information for COVID-19-related questions, like incubation time, infection rates, or the effectiveness of vaccines. As a novel solution, our paper is concerned with designing a question-answering system based on modern technologies from natural language processing to overcome information overload and misinformation in pandemic situations. To carry out our research, we followed a design science research approach and applied Ingwersen's cognitive model of information retrieval interaction to inform our design process from a socio-technical lens. On this basis, we derived prescriptive design knowledge in terms of design requirements and design principles, which we translated into the construction of a prototypical instantiation. Our implementation is based on the comprehensive CORD-19 dataset, and we demonstrate our artifact's usefulness by evaluating its answer quality based on a sample of COVID-19 questions labeled by biomedical experts. ## 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]()