List-wise learning to rank biomedical question-answer pairs with deep ranking recursive autoencoders

Biomedical question answering (QA) represents a growing concern among industry and academia due to the crucial impact of biomedical information. When mapping and ranking candidate snippet answers within relevant literature, current QA systems typically refer to information retrieval (IR) techniques: specifically, query processing approaches and ranking models. However, these IR-based approaches are insufficient to consider both syntactic and semantic relatedness and thus cannot formulate accurate natural language answers. Recently, deep learning approaches have become well-known for learning optimal semantic feature representations in natural language processing tasks. In this paper, we present a deep ranking recursive autoencoders (rankingRAE) architecture for ranking question-candidate snippet answer pairs (Q-S) to obtain the most relevant candidate answers for biomedical questions extracted from the potentially relevant documents. In particular, we convert the task of ranking candidate answers to several simultaneous binary classification tasks for determining whether a question and a candidate answer are relevant. The compositional words and their random initialized vectors of concatenated Q-S pairs are fed into recursive autoencoders to learn the optimal semantic representations in an unsupervised way, and their semantic relatedness is classified through supervised learning. Unlike several existing methods to directly choose the top-K candidates with highest probabilities, we take the influence of different ranking results into consideration. Consequently, we define a listwise “ranking error” for loss function computation to penalize inappropriate answer ranking for each question and to eliminate their influence. The proposed architecture is evaluated with respect to the BioASQ 2013-2018 Six-year Biomedical Question Answering benchmarks. Compared with classical IR models, other deep representation models, as well as some state-of-the-art systems for these tasks, the experimental results demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of rankingRAE.