Overview of BioASQ 2024: The twelfth BioASQ challenge on Large-Scale Biomedical Semantic Indexing and Question Answering
It addresses the need for improved biomedical text processing tools for researchers and practitioners, but is incremental as part of an ongoing series.
The paper presents the twelfth BioASQ challenge, which introduced two new tasks for biomedical semantic indexing and question answering, with 37 teams submitting over 700 entries, showing competitive performance and continued progress in the field.
This is an overview of the twelfth edition of the BioASQ challenge in the context of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF) 2024. 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 two new tasks: a) MultiCardioNER on the adaptation of clinical entity detection to the cardiology domain in a multilingual setting, and b) BIONNE on nested NER in Russian and English. In this edition of BioASQ, 37 competing teams participated with more than 700 distinct submissions in total for the four 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.