BioASQ Synergy: a dialogue between question-answering systems and biomedical experts for promoting COVID-19 research

This article presents the novel BioASQ Synergy research process which aims to facilitate the interaction between biomedical experts and automated question-answering systems.

The proposed research allows systems to provide answers to emerging questions, which in turn are assessed by experts. The assessment of the experts is fed back to the systems, together with new questions. With this iteration, we aim to facilitate the incremental understanding of a developing problem and contribute to solution discovery.

The results suggest that the proposed approach can assist researchers to navigate available resources. The experts seem to be very satisfied with the quality of the ideal answers provided by the systems, suggesting that such systems are already useful in answering open research questions.

BioASQ Synergy aspires to provide a tool that gives the experts easy and personalized access to the latest findings in a fast-growing corpus of material.

In this article, we envisioned BioASQ Synergy as a continuous dialogue between experts and systems to issue open questions. We ran an initial proof-of-concept of the approach, in order to evaluate its usefulness, both from the side of the experts, as well as from the side of the participating systems.