A Yes/No Answer Generator Based on Sentiment-Word Scores in Biomedical Question Answering

Background and Objective: Yes/no question answering (QA) in open-domain is a longstanding challenge widely studied over the last decades. However, it still requires further efforts in the biomedical domain. Yes/no QA aims at answering yes/no questions, which are seeking for a clear “yes” or “no” answer. In this paper, we present a novel yes/no answer generator based on sentiment-word scores in biomedical QA. Methods: In the proposed method, we first use the Stanford CoreNLP for tokenization and part-of-speech tagging all relevant passages to a given yes/no question. We then assign a sentiment score based on SentiWordNet to each word of the passages. Finally, the decision on either the answers “yes” or “no” is based on the obtained sentiment-passages score: “yes” for a positive final sentiment-passages score and “no” for a negative one. Results: Experimental evaluations performed on BioASQ collections show that the proposed method is more effective as compared with the current state-of-the-art method, and significantly outperforms it by an average of 15.68% in terms of accuracy.