# emrQA: A Large Corpus for Question Answering on Electronic Medical Records

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.00732 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00732/

## Key facts

- Cited by 135 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 3 Sep 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 135)

- [Large Language Models Encode Clinical Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13138/) (2022)
- [A Dataset of Information-Seeking Questions and Answers Anchored in Research Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03011/) (2021)
- [GatorTron: A Large Clinical Language Model to Unlock Patient Information from Unstructured Electronic Health Records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03540/) (2022)
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- [Cross-modal Memory Networks for Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13258/) (2022)
- [A Study of Generative Large Language Model for Medical Research and Healthcare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13523/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models for Healthcare: from Data, Technology, and Applications to Accountability and Ethics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05694/) (2023)
- [Benchmark Data Contamination of Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04244/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models in Medicine: Progress, Application, and Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05112/) (2023)
- [CMB: A Comprehensive Medical Benchmark in Chinese](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08833/) (2023)
- [Benchmarking Large Language Models on Answering and Explaining Challenging Medical Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18060/) (2024)
- [Do We Still Need Clinical Language Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08091/) (2023)
- [ExpertQA: Expert-Curated Questions and Attributed Answers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07852/) (2023)
- [QA Dataset Explosion: A Taxonomy of NLP Resources for Question Answering and Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12708/) (2021)
- [Benchmarking Large Language Models on CMExam -- A Comprehensive Chinese Medical Exam Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03030/) (2023)
- [Pre-trained Language Models in Biomedical Domain: A Systematic Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05006/) (2021)
- [Towards Mitigating Hallucination in Large Language Models via Self-Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06271/) (2023)
- [SPIQA: A Dataset for Multimodal Question Answering on Scientific Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09413/) (2024)
- [Memorization vs. Generalization: Quantifying Data Leakage in NLP Performance Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01818/) (2021)
- [Clinical-Longformer and Clinical-BigBird: Transformers for long clinical sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11838/) (2022)
- [MedAlign: A Clinician-Generated Dataset for Instruction Following with Electronic Medical Records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14089/) (2023)
- [ECG-QA: A Comprehensive Question Answering Dataset Combined With Electrocardiogram](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15681/) (2023)
- [EHRXQA: A Multi-Modal Question Answering Dataset for Electronic Health Records with Chest X-ray Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18652/) (2023)
- [Biomedical Question Answering: A Survey of Approaches and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05281/) (2021)
- [EHRSQL: A Practical Text-to-SQL Benchmark for Electronic Health Records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07695/) (2023)
- [MedicalAgentsBench for Complex Medical Reasoning: Comparing Internalized Reasoning Models versus Externalized Agent-based Frameworks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07459/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Scientific Large Language Models: From Data Foundations to Agent Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21148/) (2025)
- [A Comparative Study of Pretrained Language Models for Long Clinical Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11847/) (2023)
- [EHRNoteQA: An LLM Benchmark for Real-World Clinical Practice Using Discharge Summaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16040/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Medical Large Language Models: Technology, Application, Trustworthiness, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03712/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a novel methodology to generate domain-specific large-scale question answering (QA) datasets by re-purposing existing annotations for other NLP tasks. We demonstrate an instance of this methodology in generating a large-scale QA dataset for electronic medical records by leveraging existing expert annotations on clinical notes for various NLP tasks from the community shared i2b2 datasets. The resulting corpus (emrQA) has 1 million question-logical form and 400,000+ question-answer evidence pairs. We characterize the dataset and explore its learning potential by training baseline models for question to logical form and question to answer mapping.
