Extractive Clinical Question-Answering With Multianswer and Multifocus Questions: Data Set Development and Evaluation Study.

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 yield multiple answers to a single question and multiple focus points in 1 question, which are lacking in existing data sets for the development of artificial intelligence solutions.

Objective: This study aimed to create a data set for developing and evaluating clinical EQA systems that can handle natural multianswer and multifocus questions.