MedLogic-AQA: Enhancing Medicare Question Answering with Abstractive Models Focusing on Logical Structures

Aizan Zafar, Kshitij Mishra, Asif Ekbal


Abstract
In Medicare question-answering (QA) tasks, the need for effective systems is pivotal in delivering accurate responses to intricate medical queries. However, existing approaches often struggle to grasp the intricate logical structures and relationships inherent in medical contexts, thus limiting their capacity to furnish precise and nuanced answers. In this work, we address this gap by proposing a novel Abstractive QA system MedLogic-AQA that harnesses first-order logic-based rules extracted from both context and questions to generate well-grounded answers. Through initial experimentation, we identified six pertinent first-order logical rules, which were then used to train a Logic-Understanding (LU) model capable of generating logical triples for a given context, question, and answer. These logic triples are then integrated into the training of MediLogic-AQA, enabling reasoned and coherent reasoning during answer generation. This distinctive fusion of logical reasoning with abstractive question answering equips our system to produce answers that are logically sound, relevant, and engaging. Evaluation with respect to both automated and human-based demonstrates the robustness of MedLogic-AQA against strong baselines. Through empirical assessments and case studies, we validate the efficacy of MedLogic-AQA in elevating the quality and comprehensiveness of answers in terms of reasoning as well as informativeness.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.981
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
16844–16867
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.981/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.981
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Aizan Zafar, Kshitij Mishra, and Asif Ekbal. 2024. MedLogic-AQA: Enhancing Medicare Question Answering with Abstractive Models Focusing on Logical Structures. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 16844–16867, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MedLogic-AQA: Enhancing Medicare Question Answering with Abstractive Models Focusing on Logical Structures (Zafar et al., Findings 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.981.pdf