Olelo: A question answering application for biomedicine

Abstract

Despite the importance of the biomedical domain, there are few reliable applications to support researchers and physicians for retrieving particular facts that fit their needs. Users typically rely on search engines that only support keyword- and filter-based searches. We present Olelo, a question answering system for biomedicine. Olelo is built on top of an in-memory database, integrates domain resources, such as document collections and terminologies, and uses various natural language processing components. Olelo is fast, intuitive and easy to use. We evaluated the systems on two use cases: answering questions related to a particular gene and on the BioASQ benchmark.