Can Esculape cure the complex of œdipe in the medical domain?

Abstract

In this article, we present Esculape, a question-answering system for French dedicated to family doctors and built from œdipe, an open-domain system. Esculape adds to œdipe the capability to exploit the concepts and relations of a domain model, the medical domain in the present case. Although a large number of resources exist in this domain (UMLS, MeSH ...), it is not possible to rely only on them, and more specifically on the relations they contain, to answer questions. We show how this difficulty can be overcome by learning linguistic patterns for identifying relations and applying them to extract answers.