What Disease Does This Patient Have? A Large-Scale Open Domain Question Answering Dataset from Medical Exams

• Main Authors: Di Jin, Eileen Pan, Nassim Oufattole, Wei-Hung Weng, Hanyi Fang, Peter Szolovits
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-07-01
• Series: Applied Sciences
• Subjects: natural language processing; open-domain question answering; multi-choice question answering; clinical question answering
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/11/14/6421

Open domain question answering (OpenQA) tasks have been recently attracting more and more attention from the natural language processing (NLP) community. In this work, we present the first free-form multiple-choice OpenQA dataset for solving medical problems, <span style="font-variant: small-caps;">MedQA</span>, collected from the professional medical board exams. It covers three languages: English, simplified Chinese, and traditional Chinese, and contains 12,723, 34,251, and 14,123 questions for the three languages, respectively. We implement both rule-based and popular neural methods by sequentially combining a document retriever and a machine comprehension model. Through experiments, we find that even the current best method can only achieve 36.7%, 42.0%, and 70.1% of test accuracy on the English, traditional Chinese, and simplified Chinese questions, respectively. We expect <span style="font-variant: small-caps;">MedQA</span> to present great challenges to existing OpenQA systems and hope that it can serve as a platform to promote much stronger OpenQA models from the NLP community in the future.