Abstract
The large-scale biomedical semantic indexing and question-answering challenge (BioASQ) aims at the continuous advancement of methods and tools to meet the needs of biomedical researchers and practitioners for efficient and precise access to the ever-increasing resources of their domain. With this purpose, during the last eleven years, a series of annual challenges have been organized with specific shared tasks on large-scale biomedical semantic indexing and question answering. Benchmark datasets have been concomitantly provided in alignment with the real needs of biomedical experts, providing a unique common testbed where different teams around the world can investigate and compare new approaches for accessing biomedical knowledge.
The twelfth version of the BioASQ Challenge will be held as an evaluation Lab within CLEF2024 providing four shared tasks: (i) Task b on the information retrieval for biomedical questions, and the generation of comprehensible answers. (ii) Task Synergy the information retrieval and generation of answers for open biomedical questions on developing topics, in collaboration with the experts posing the questions. (iii) Task MultiCardioNER on the automated annotation of clinical entities in medical documents in the field of cardiology, primarily in Spanish, English, Italian and Dutch. (iv) Task BioNNE on the automated annotation of biomedical documents in Russian and English with nested named entity annotations. As BioASQ rewards the methods that outperform the state of the art in these shared tasks, it pushes the research frontier towards approaches that accelerate access to biomedical knowledge.
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Notes
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Since the first BioASQ, the task on large-scale biomedical semantic indexing is called Task a, and the task on biomedical QA is called Task b, for brevity. After the completion of Task a [5], we keep this naming convention for Task b for consistency.
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Acknowledgments
Google was a proud sponsor of the BioASQ Challenge in 2023. The twelfth edition of BioASQ is also sponsored by Ovid Technologies, Inc., Elsevier, and Atypon Systems inc. The task MultiCardioNER is supported by the Spanish Plan for the Advancement of Language Technologies (Plan TL), the 2020 Proyectos de I+D+i-RTI Tipo A (Descifrando El Papel De Las Profesiones En La Salud De Los Pacientes A Traves De La Mineria De Textos, PID2020-119266RA-I00). This project has received funding from the European Union Horizon Europe Coordination and Support Action under Grant Agreement No 101058779 (BIOMATDB) and DataTools4Heart - DT4H, Grant agreement No 101057849. The work on the BioNNE task was supported by the Russian Science Foundation [grant number 23-11-00358].
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Nentidis, A. et al. (2024). BioASQ at CLEF2024: The Twelfth Edition of the Large-Scale Biomedical Semantic Indexing and Question Answering Challenge. In: Goharian, N., et al. Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14612. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56069-9_67
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