BioASQ: A Challenge on Large-Scale Biomedical Semantic Indexing and Question Answering.

Abstract

This article provides an overview of BIOASQ, a new com-petition on biomedical semantic indexing and question an-swering (QA). BIOASQ aims to push towards systems that will allow biomedical workers to express their information needs in natural language and that will return concise and user-understandable answers by combining information from multiple sources of different kinds, including biomedical ar-ticles, databases, and ontologies. BIOASQ encourages par-ticipants to adopt semantic indexing as a means to combine multiple information sources and to facilitate the matching of questions to answers. It also adopts a broad semantic in-dexing and QA architecture that subsumes current relevant approaches, even though no current system instantiates all of its components. Hence, the architecture can also be seen as our view of how relevant work from fields such as infor-mation retrieval, hierarchical classification, question answer-ing, ontologies, and linked data can be combined, extended, and applied to biomedical question answering. BIOASQ will develop publicly available benchmarks and it will adopt and possibly refine existing evaluation measures. The evaluation infrastructure of the competition will remain publicly avail-able beyond the end of BIOASQ.