It is suggested that considering a biomedical QA task is not necessarily such a simplification over open-domain QA as represented in the recent TREC evaluations.
The recent developments in Question Answering have kept with open-domain questions and collections, sometimes argued as being more di fficult than narrow domain-focused questions and corpora. The biomedical field is indeed a specialized domain; however, its scope is fairly broad, so that considering a biomedical QA task is not necessarily such a simplification over open-domain QA as represented in the recent TREC evaluations. We shall try to characterize salient aspects of biomedical QA as well as to give a short review of useful resources to address this task.