Article published and nominated for best paper at ECIS 2022
Together with colleagues at TU-Dresden, we published a paper entitled "Where was COVID-19 first discovered? Designing a question-answering system for pandemic situations" in the ECIS 2022 proceedings, more specifically in the Design Science track. The paper has won the best paper in track award and was also nominated for best conference paper.
The COVID-19 pandemic is accompanied by a massive "infodemic" that makes it hard to identify concise and credible information for COVID-19-related questions, like incubation time, infection rates, or the effectiveness of vaccines. As a novel solution, our paper is concerned with designing a question-answering system based on modern technologies from natural language processing to overcome information overload and misinformation in pandemic situations. To carry out our research, we followed a design science research approach and applied Ingwersen's cognitive model of information retrieval interaction to inform our design process from a socio-technical lens. On this basis, we derived prescriptive design knowledge in terms of design requirements and design principles, which we translated into the construction of a prototypical instantiation. Our implementation is based on the comprehensive CORD-19 dataset, and we demonstrate our artifact's usefulness by evaluating its answer quality based on a sample of COVID-19 questions labeled by biomedical experts.
You can find a preprint of the article here.