# Development of an Extractive Clinical Question Answering Dataset with Multi-Answer and Multi-Focus Questions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.02517 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02517/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jan 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Know What You Don't Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuAD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03822/) (2018)
- [Publicly Available Clinical BERT Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03323/) (2019)
- [The Natural Language Decathlon: Multitask Learning as Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08730/) (2018)
- [emrQA: A Large Corpus for Question Answering on Electronic Medical Records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00732/) (2018)
- [Biomedical Question Answering: A Survey of Approaches and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05281/) (2021)
- [A Multi-Type Multi-Span Network for Reading Comprehension that Requires Discrete Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05514/) (2019)
- [Clinical Reading Comprehension: A Thorough Analysis of the emrQA Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00574/) (2020)
- [Sequence tagging for biomedical extractive question answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07535/) (2021)
- [Annotating Electronic Medical Records for Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06816/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [EHRNoteQA: An LLM Benchmark for Real-World Clinical Practice Using Discharge Summaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16040/) (2024)
- [Question Answering for Electronic Health Records: A Scoping Review of datasets and models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08759/) (2023)
- [BioMol-MQA: A Multi-Modal Question Answering Dataset For LLM Reasoning Over Bio-Molecular Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05766/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Background: Extractive question-answering (EQA) is a useful natural language processing (NLP) application for answering patient-specific questions by locating answers in their clinical notes. Realistic clinical EQA can have multiple answers to a single question and multiple focus points in one question, which are lacking in the existing datasets for development of artificial intelligence solutions. Objective: Create a dataset for developing and evaluating clinical EQA systems that can handle natural multi-answer and multi-focus questions. Methods: We leveraged the annotated relations from the 2018 National NLP Clinical Challenges (n2c2) corpus to generate an EQA dataset. Specifically, the 1-to-N, M-to-1, and M-to-N drug-reason relations were included to form the multi-answer and multi-focus QA entries, which represent more complex and natural challenges in addition to the basic one-drug-one-reason cases. A baseline solution was developed and tested on the dataset. Results: The derived RxWhyQA dataset contains 96,939 QA entries. Among the answerable questions, 25% require multiple answers, and 2% ask about multiple drugs within one question. There are frequent cues observed around the answers in the text, and 90% of the drug and reason terms occur within the same or an adjacent sentence. The baseline EQA solution achieved a best f1-measure of 0.72 on the entire dataset, and on specific subsets, it was: 0.93 on the unanswerable questions, 0.48 on single-drug questions versus 0.60 on multi-drug questions, 0.54 on the single-answer questions versus 0.43 on multi-answer questions. Discussion: The RxWhyQA dataset can be used to train and evaluate systems that need to handle multi-answer and multi-focus questions. Specifically, multi-answer EQA appears to be challenging and therefore warrants more investment in research.