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Table 1 Question answering system comparison matrix of features for HONQA, askHERMES, and the EAGLi systems

From: Usability survey of biomedical question answering systems

QA Comparison Matrix

 

EAGLi

askHERMES

HONQA

Web address

eagl.unige.ch/EAGLi

http://www.askhermes.org

services.hon.ch/cgi-bin/QA10/qa.pl

Data sources

MEDLINE abstracts

MEDLINE abstracts, eMedicine, clinical guidelines, PubMedCentral, and Wikipedia

HON certified websites

Answers

Multi-phrase passages and a list of single entities

Multiple sentence passages

Sentence

Language

English

English

English/French

System response

Slow

Fast

Slow

Interface complexity

Complex but many tooltips

Simple

Very simple

Question analysis

Yes

Yes

Yes

Target question types

Definition

All types

Definition, procedure, factoid, who

Key feature

Returns a list of ranked terms to answer ‘‘factual‘’ questions

Answers are presented in three ways: answers clustered by terms, simple ranked answer list, and answers clustered by content

Use of certified health websites which allow for information to be geared towards people with varying levels of health literacy