Abstract
During the last twelve years, the large-scale biomedical semantic indexing and question-answering challenge (BioASQ) has been pushing towards the continuous advancement of methods and tools to accelerate access to the ever-increasing scientific resources of the biomedical domain. In this direction, each year, BioASQ organizes shared tasks representing the real information needs of biomedical experts and provides respective benchmark datasets. This way, it provides a unique common testbed where research teams around the world can test and compare new approaches for accessing biomedical knowledge.
The thirteenth version of BioASQ will be held as an evaluation Lab in the context of CLEF2025 providing six tasks: (i) Task b on biomedical semantic question answering. (ii) Task Synergy on question answering developing biomedical topics. (iii) Task MultiClinSum on multilingual clinical summarization. (iv) Task BioNNE-L on nested named entity linking in Russian and English. (v) Task ELCardioCC on clinical coding in cardiology. (vi) Task GutBrainIE on gut-brain interplay information extraction. As BioASQ rewards the methods that outperform the state of the art in these shared tasks, it keeps pushing the research frontier towards approaches that will meet the need for efficient and precise access to biomedical knowledge.
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Notes
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Since the first BioASQ, the task on biomedical semantic indexing has been called Task a and the task on QA Task b, for brevity. Task a was completed in 2020 [8].
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Acknowledgments
Google was a sponsor of BioASQ in 2024. This edition of BioASQ was also sponsored by Ovid Technologies, Inc., Elsevier, and Atypon Systems inc. This research was funded by the Spanish National BARITONE project (TED2021-129974B-C22). This work is also supported by the European Union’s Horizon Europe Co-ordination & Support Action under Grant Agreement No 101080430 (AI4HF), as well as Grant Agreement No 101057849 (DataTool4Heartproject). The work on the BioNNE-L task was supported by the Russian Science Foundation [grant number 23-11-00358]. This work is partially supported by the HEREDITARY Project, as part of the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No GA 101137074.
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Nentidis, A. et al. (2025). BioASQ at CLEF2025: The Thirteenth Edition of the Large-Scale Biomedical Semantic Indexing and Question Answering Challenge. In: Hauff, C., et al. Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2025. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 15576. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-88720-8_61
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