# Sequence tagging for biomedical extractive question answering

Source: [Sequence tagging for biomedical extractive question answering](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa6cfa1e209131cea3710d>)

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

Data updated: 2025-10-26T00:23:36.215Z

Authors: Wonjin Yoon, Richard Jackson, Aron Lagerberg, Jaewoo Kang

Published: 2021-04-15T15:42:34.000Z

## Abstract

Current studies in extractive question answering (EQA) have modeled the single-span extraction setting, where a single answer span is a label to predict for a given question-passage pair. This setting is natural for general domain EQA as the majority of the questions in the general domain can be answered with a single span. Following general domain EQA models, current biomedical EQA (BioEQA) models utilize the single-span extraction setting with post-processing steps. In this article, we investigate the question distribution across the general and biomedical domains and discover biomedical questions are more likely to require list-type answers (multiple answers) than factoid-type answers (single answer). This necessitates the models capable of producing multiple answers for a question. Based on this preliminary study, we propose a sequence tagging approach for BioEQA, which is a multi-span extraction setting. Our approach directly tackles questions with a variable number of phrases as their answer and can learn to decide the number of answers for a question from training data. Our experimental results on the BioASQ 7b and 8b list-type questions outperformed the best-performing existing models without requiring post-processing steps. Source codes and resources are freely available for download at https://github.com/dmis-lab/SeqTagQA

## 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/2104.07535>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.07535.pdf>)