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Overview of BioASQ 2023: The Eleventh BioASQ Challenge on Large-Scale Biomedical Semantic Indexing and Question Answering

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Experimental IR Meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Interaction (CLEF 2023)

Abstract

This is an overview of the eleventh edition of the BioASQ challenge in the context of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF) 2023. BioASQ is a series of international challenges promoting advances in large-scale biomedical semantic indexing and question answering. This year, BioASQ consisted of new editions of the two established tasks b and Synergy, and a new task (MedProcNER) on semantic annotation of clinical content in Spanish with medical procedures, which have a critical role in medical practice. In this edition of BioASQ, 28 competing teams submitted the results of more than 150 distinct systems in total for the three different shared tasks of the challenge. Similarly to previous editions, most of the participating systems achieved competitive performance, suggesting the continuous advancement of the state-of-the-art in the field.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7817745.

  2. 2.

    https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7817666.

  3. 3.

    https://spacy.io/.

  4. 4.

    https://plantl.mineco.gob.es.

  5. 5.

    http://participants-area.bioasq.org/Tasks/b/eval_meas_2022/.

  6. 6.

    http://participants-area.bioasq.org/results/11b/phaseA/.

  7. 7.

    http://participants-area.bioasq.org/results/11b/phaseB/.

  8. 8.

    http://participants-area.bioasq.org/results/synergy_v2023/.

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Acknowledgments

Google was a proud sponsor of the BioASQ Challenge in 2022. The eleventh edition of BioASQ is also sponsored by Ovid. Atypon Systems Inc. is also sponsoring this edition of BioASQ. The MEDLINE/PubMed data resources considered in this work were accessed courtesy of the U.S. National Library of Medicine. BioASQ is grateful to the CMU team for providing the exact answer baselines for task 11b, as well as to Georgios Moschovis and Ion Androutsopoulos, from the Athens University of Economics and Business, for providing the ideal answer baselines. The MedProcNER track was partially funded by the Encargo of Plan TL (SEDIA) to the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. Due to the relevance of medical procedures for implants/devices specially in the case cardiac diseases this project is also supported by the European Union’s Horizon Europe Coordination & Support Action under Grant Agreement No 101058779 (BIOMATDB) and DataTools4Heart Grant Agreement No. 101057849. We also acknowledge the support from the AI4PROFHEALTH project (PID2020-119266RA-I00).

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Nentidis, A. et al. (2023). Overview of BioASQ 2023: The Eleventh BioASQ Challenge on Large-Scale Biomedical Semantic Indexing and Question Answering. In: Arampatzis, A., et al. Experimental IR Meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Interaction. CLEF 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14163. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42448-9_19

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