Automatic Question Answering (QA) has been successfully applied in various domains such as search engines and chatbots. Biomedical QA (BQA), as an emerging QA task, enables innovative applications to effectively perceive, access and understand complex biomedical knowledge. There have been tremendous developments of BQA in the past two decades, which we classify into 5 distinctive approaches: classic, information retrieval, machine reading comprehension, knowledge base and question entailment approaches. In this survey, we introduce available datasets and representative methods of each BQA approach in detail. Despite the developments, BQA systems are still immature and rarely used in real-life settings. We identify and characterize several key challenges in BQA that might lead to this issue, and discuss some potential future directions to explore.

翻译：生物医学质量评估(BQA)作为一项新兴的质量评估任务,使得创新应用能够有效地认识、获取和理解复杂的生物医学知识。在过去20年中,生物医学质量评估(QA)取得了巨大的发展,我们将其分为五种独特的方法:经典方法、信息检索方法、机器阅读理解方法、知识基础和问题要求方法。在这次调查中,我们详细介绍了每一种BQA方法的现有数据集和代表性方法。尽管有了这些发展,但BQA系统仍然不成熟,很少在现实生活中使用。我们发现并确定了BQA中可能导致这一问题的若干关键挑战,并讨论了今后探索的一些潜在方向。