Question answering for Biology

Biologists often pose queries to search engines and biological databases to obtain answers related to ongoing experiments. This is known to be a time consuming, and sometimes frustrating, task in which more than one query is posed and many databases are consulted to come to possible answers for a single fact. Question answering comes as an alternative to this process by allowing queries to be posed as questions, by integrating various resources of different nature and by returning an exact answer to the user. We have surveyed the current solutions on question answering for Biology, present an overview on the methods which are usually employed and give insights on how to boost performance of systems in this domain. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.