Designing a Neural Question-Answering System for Times of (Information) Pandemics

Based on Ingwersen’s cognitive model of information retrieval interaction and natural language processing, this article presents (1) design knowledge in the form of requirements, principles, and features, and (2) an artifact to instantiate the design knowledge into a novel IT artifact for COVID-19 information retrieval. We conducted several evaluation episodes, encompassing technical validations and an experiment, to investigate the artifact’s performance. Our work contributes to managing information and designing artifacts to handle situations of uncertainty.