With simple python requests, you can get answers from covidAsk.

import requests
import json
from requests.packages.urllib3.exceptions import InsecureRequestWarning
requests.packages.urllib3.disable_warnings(InsecureRequestWarning)

def covidAsk(query):
    params = {'query': query, 'strat': 'dense_first'}
    res = requests.get('https://covidask.korea.ac.kr/api', params=params, verify=False)
    outs = json.loads(res.text)
    return outs

query = "Is there concrete evidence for the presence of asymptomatic transmissions?"
results = covidAsk(query)

# Top 10 phrase answers from covidAsk
print([r['answer'] for r in results['ret']])

The results will look like:

['little', 'lacking', 'no', 'evidence suggests the possibility of transmission from camel products or asymptomatic MERS cases', 'No', 'there is mixed', 'The research evidence is very lacking', 'there are a few', 'there are a few', 'There are few']

See example.py and our Kaggle submission for more examples. To build your own covidAsk and host the system, See below.

covidAsk is based on PyTorch and Faiss. You can install the environment with environment.yml.

$ conda env create -f environment.yml
$ conda activate covidAsk

Note that our code is mostly based on DenSPI and DrQA.

We provide pre-processed CORD-19 datasets, pre-trained QA models, and their phrase dumps.

$ ./download.sh

This downloads all required resources (18GB) to your current directory. data directory has pre-processed datasets and evaluation dataset, models directory has pre-trained models, and dumps directory has phrase dumps obtained by the pre-trained models.

We previde two pre-processed versions of CORD-19 abstracts which will be used to make phrase dumps of DenSPI. We additionally extracted biomedical named entities using a multitask version of BERN and linked them into Concept Unique IDs using BioSyn (Sung et al., ACL 2020; will be open-sourced soon). Note that the format of pre-processed datasets is the same as SQuAD but with additional keys.

• Pre-processed 37k CORD-19 abstracts with extracted biomedical entities (data/2020-04-10) [link]
• Pre-processed 31k CORD-19 abstracts with extracted biomedical entities (2020-03-20 dump) [link]
• 74 sample questions with annotated answers from Kaggle, CDC, and WHO (data/eval)

We use DenSPI as our base model for question answering. DenSPI supports a real-time question answering on a large unstructured corpus. To train your own DenSPI, see here. Our version of DenSPI is also trained with learnable sparse representations (Lee et al., ACL 2020; will be open-sourced soon). We provide two pretrained DenSPI as follows:

• DenSPI trained on SQuAD (models/denspi) - currently served at https://covidask.korea.ac.kr
• DenSPI trained on SQuAD + NaturalQuestions (models/denspi-nq)

models/denspi is more suitable for long, formal questions (e.g., Is there concrete evidence for the presence of asymptomatic transmissions?) and models/denspi-nq is good at short questions (e.g., covid-19 origin).

We use the 2020-04-10 CORD-19 dataset for making the phrase dumps. We provide two phrase dumps obtained from the two models above.

• 2020-04-10 with DenSPI (SQuAD) - dumps/denspi_2020-04-10
• 2020-04-10 with DenSPI (SQuAD + NQ) - dumps/denspi-nq_2020-04-10

To make your own phrase dumps with different articles, run create_dump.sh. If you are going to use one of the provided phrase dumps above, you can skip this part and go to the Hosting section. Make sure that the paths for pre-trained DenSPI and pre-processed datasets are pointing the right directories.

$ ./create_dump.sh

This will create a new phrase dump under dumps_new/$MODEL_$DATA. Note that it will take approximately 1 hour when using data/2020-04-10. See log files in logs/ to check if dumping is done. After the dumping, you need to run create_index.sh to make tfidf vectors of documents and paragraphs, and MIPS for phrase vectors.

$ ./create_index.sh

Before running, please change the directories in create_index.sh accordingly.

To serve your own covidAsk, use serve.sh script.

$ ./serve.sh

This will host a new server in localhost with the specified port (default $PORT: 9030). You will also need to serve query encoder (default $Q_PORT: 9010) and the metadata (default $D_PORT: 9020) at separate ports. Note that the model used for query encoding should be the same as the model that created the phrase dump. If you want to change the phrase dump to what you have created, change $DUMP_DIR to the new phrase dump (e.g., DUMP_DIR=dumps_new/denspi_2020-04-10) and --doc_ranker_name used in d_serve to $DATA-tfidf-ngram=2-hash=16777216-tokenizer=simple.npz. We also use biomedical entity search engine, BEST, to provide further information regarding the entities in the query.

Once you properly setup the server, you can ask questions with a simple python coding:

from covidask import covidAsk

# Set $PORT
covidask = covidAsk(index_port='9030')

# Ask a question to covidAsk
query = "Is there concrete evidence for the presence of asymptomatic transmissions?"
result = covidask.query(query)
print([r['answer'] for r in result['ret']])

See example.py for more search options.

We manually created a small evaluation set consisting of 74 questions regarding COVID-19 from Kaggle, CDC and WHO. Use data/eval/kaggle_cdc_who_augmented.json for the evaluation. You can make API calls to evaluate the server as:

$ python covidask.py --run_mode eval_request --index_port $PORT --test_path data/eval/kaggle_cdc_who_augmented.json

Or, you can evaluate by loading phrase dumps onto the memory as:

$ python covidask.py --run_mode eval_inmemory --query_port $Q_PORT --doc_port $D_PORT --dump_dir $DUMP_DIR --test_path data/eval/kaggle_cdc_who_augmented.json

This will save a prediction file into pred/kaggle_cdc_who_augmented.pred with results as follows:

04/17/2020 02:14:41 - INFO - __main__ -   {'exact_match_top1': 17.56756756756757, 'f1_score_top1': 26.885230840315774}
04/17/2020 02:14:41 - INFO - __main__ -   {'exact_match_top10': 25.675675675675677, 'f1_score_top10': 43.14339166481719}

Technical report of our work will be arxived soon with following bibtex.

@article{lee2020covidask,
  title={Answering Domain-Specific Questions in Real-Time for COVID-19 Research},
  author={Lee, Jinhyuk and Jeong, Minbyul and Sung, Mujeen and Yoon, Wonjin and Sung, Mujeen and Choi, Yonghwa and Ko, Miyoung and Lee, Seok-Won and Kang, Jaewoo},
  journal={arxiv},
  year={2020}
}

For any issues regarding covidAsk, please register a GitHub issue. For any collaboration related to covidAsk, please contact Jinhyuk Lee (lee.jnhk (at) gmail.com).