A Protocol-Driven Approach to Automatically Finding Authoritative Answers to Consumer Health Questions in Online Resources

摘要

The purpose of this research was to establish an upper bound on finding answers to health-related questions in MedlinePlus and other online resources. Seven reference librarians tested a set of protocols to determine whether it was possible to use the types and foci of the questions extracted from customer requests submitted to the National Library of Medicine to find authoritative answers to these questions. Librarians tested the protocols manually to determine if the process was sufficiently robust and accurate to later automate. Results indicated that the extracted terms provide enough information to find authoritative answers for about 60% of questions and that certain question types are more likely to result in authoritative answers than others. The question corpus and analysis performed for this project will inform automatic question answering systems, and could lead to suggestions for new content to include in MedlinePlus. This approach can serve as an example to researchers interested in methods of evaluating question answering tools and the contents of online databases.