BanglaMed-QA: A Question Answering System for Healthcare Support in Bangla

Medical question answering (QA) systems have become crucial tools for providing reliable health information. But they remain very unexplored for low-resource languages like Bangla due to limited datasets and systems tailored to these languages. To address this, we introduce BanglaMed-QA, a robust QA system specifically designed for the Bangla medical domain. The process begins with building a structured medical knowledge base that includes 4,493 QA pairs in 9 categories under 506 diseases. To improve semantic comprehension, domain-specific root word dictionaries and synonym sets are proposed, in addition to part-of-speech tagging for anaphora resolution. We adopt supervised machine learning models in which SVM is found to be the best model to categorize questions. Multiple similarity metrics, including cosine, Jaccard, BM25, and Levenshtein, are applied with soft and hard voting methods for query matching. The performance of the QA system has been evaluated in two aspects, with a 95% F1 score in an automated evaluation and an average human satisfaction rating of 0.9 out of 1.0. This validates the real-world application of BanglaMed-QA in closing the healthcare information gap for Bangla speakers.