Calling Attention to Passages for Biomedical Question Answering

Question answering can be described as retrieving relevant information for questions expressed in natural language, possibly also generating a natural language answer. This paper presents a pipeline for document and passage retrieval for biomedical question answering built around a new variant of the DeepRank network model in which the recursive layer is replaced by a self-attention layer combined with a weighting mechanism. This adaptation halves the total number of parameters and makes the network more suited for identifying the relevant passages in each document. The overall retrieval system was evaluated on the BioASQ tasks 6 and 7, achieving similar retrieval performance when compared to more complex network architectures.