Open domain question answering (OpenQA) tasks have been recently attracting more and more attention
from the natural language processing (NLP) community. In this work, we present the first free-form
multiple-choice OpenQA dataset for solving medical problems, MedQA, collected from the professional
medical board exams. It covers three languages: English, simplified Chinese, and traditional
Chinese, and contains 12,723, 34,251, and 14,123 questions for the three languages, respectively.
We implement both rule-based and popular neural methods by sequentially combining a document
retriever and a machine comprehension model. Through experiments, we find that even the current
best method can only achieve 36.7%, 42.0%, and 70.1% of test accuracy on the English,
traditional Chinese, and simplified Chinese questions, respectively. We expect MedQA to present
great challenges to existing OpenQA systems and hope that it can serve as a platform to promote
much stronger OpenQA models from the NLP community in the future.
