Towards unified medical evidence computation from literature for evidence-based medicine

Evidence-based Medicine (EBM) is the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patient. Billions of dollars are spent annually on the conduct of randomized clinical trials (RCT), one type of experiments widely regarded as yielding the most valuable evidence. Yet, the number of studies is growing exponentially, and most experiment results are published only as text-based articles in the medical journal, causing difficulties for both practitioners and researchers in searching, synthesizing, and ultimately, translating the best available evidence to the patient care. To address the problem, I aim to develop a unified information extraction framework for medical evidence, and build novel computational approaches based upon it to make evidence from research more accessible in Evidence-based Medicine. In this dissertation, I (i) present a unified conceptual model and coordinated workflow for evidence representation, (ii) develop open-source NLP tools for supporting EBM tasks (evidence extraction, retrieval, and synthesis), (iii) develop a medical evidence base to cater various information needs, and (iv) present a new machine reading comprehension model for answering clinical questions.