OQA: A question-answering dataset on orthodontic literature

Background: The near-exponential increase in the number of publications in orthodontics poses a challenge for efficient literature appraisal and evidence-based practice. Language models (LM) have the potential, through their question-answering fine-tuning, to assist clinicians and researchers in critical appraisal of scientific information and thus to improve decision-making. Methods: This paper introduces OrthodonticQA (OQA), the first question-answering dataset in the field of dentistry which is made publicly available under a permissive license. A framework is proposed which includes utilization of PICO information and templates for question formulation, demonstrating their broader applicability across various specialties within dentistry and healthcare. A selection of transformer LMs were trained on OQA to set performance baselines. Results: The best model achieved a mean F1 score of 77.61 (SD 0.26) and a score of 100/114 (87.72\%) on human evaluation. Furthermore, when exploring performance according to grouped subtopics within the field of orthodontics, it was found that for all LMs the performance can vary considerably across topics. Conclusion: Our findings highlight the importance of subtopic evaluation and superior performance of paired domain specific model and tokenizer.