Fostering Natural Language Question Answering Over Knowledge Bases in Oncology EHR

Abstract

This paper presents an approach for natural language question answering over a knowledge base generated by a medical texts information extraction process. The primary objective is to present a solution to help practitioners in oncology healthcare clinical environment with an intuitive method to access stored data. We identify health professional's needs in terms of information and interface with EHR systems. After that, we demonstrate a proposal to allow the integration of information extraction from clinical notes, knowledge base generation, and natural language question answering. The primary contributions are the identification of a solution to health professionals needs regarding usability in information access, and the demonstration of advantages obtained in representing health contents in a knowledge base.