Abstract: In this paper, we detail our submission to the 2019, 7th year, BioASQ competition. We present our approach for Task-7b, Phase B, Exact Answering Task. These Question Answering (QA) tasks include Factoid, Yes/No, List Type Question answering. Our system is based on a contextual word embedding model. We have used a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers(BERT) based system, fined tuned for biomedical question answering task using BioBERT. In the third test batch set, our system achieved the highest MRR score for Factoid Question Answering task. Also, for List type question answering task our system achieved the highest recall score in the fourth test batch set. Along with our detailed approach, we present the results for our submissions, and also highlight identified downsides for our current approach and ways to improve them in our future experiments.

Introduction: BioASQ is a biomedical document classification, document retrieval, and question answering competition, currently in its seventh year. We provide an overview of our submissions to semantic question answering task (7b, Phase B) of BioASQ 7 (except for 'ideal answer' test, in which we did not participate this year). In this task systems are provided with biomedical questions and are required to submit ideal and exact answers to those questions. We have used BioBERT BIBREF0 based system , see also Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers(BERT) BIBREF1, and we fine tuned it for the biomedical question answering task. Our system scored near the top for factoid questions for all the batches of the challenge. More specifially, in the third test batch set, our system achieved highest ‘MRR’ score for Factoid Question Answering task. Also, for List-type question answering task our system achieved highest recall score in the fourth test batch set. Along with our detailed approach, we present the results for our submissions and also highlight identified downsides for our current approach and ways to improve them in our future experiments. In last test batch results we placed 4th for List-type questions and 3rd for Factoid-type questions.) The QA task is organized in two phases. Phase A deals with retrieval of the relevant document, snippets, concepts, and RDF triples, and phase B deals with exact and ideal answer generations (which is a paragraph size summary of snippets). Exact answer generation is required for factoid, list, and yes/no type question. BioASQ organizers provide the training and testing data. The training data consists of questions, gold standard documents, snippets, concepts, and ideal answers (which we did not use in this paper, but we used last year BIBREF2). The test data is split between phases A and B. The Phase A dataset consists of the questions, unique ids, question types. The Phase B dataset consists of the questions, golden standard documents, snippets, unique ids and question types. Exact answers for factoid type questions are evaluated using strict accuracy (the top answer), lenient accuracy (the top 5 answers), and MRR (Mean Reciprocal Rank) which takes into account the ranks of returned answers. Answers for the list type question are evaluated using precision, recall, and F-measure.

Question: What was their highest MRR score?
Answer: 0.5115