Overview of BioASQ 2025: The Thirteenth BioASQ Challenge on Large-Scale Biomedical Semantic Indexing and Question Answering
This work addresses the need for improved tools in biomedical information processing for researchers and practitioners, but it is incremental as it builds on an established challenge series.
The paper presents the thirteenth BioASQ challenge, which introduced four new tasks in biomedical semantic indexing and question answering, such as multilingual clinical summarization and nested named entity linking, with 83 teams submitting over 1000 entries, leading to competitive performance and state-of-the-art advancements.
This is an overview of the thirteenth edition of the BioASQ challenge in the context of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF) 2025. 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 four new tasks: a) Task MultiClinSum on multilingual clinical summarization. b) Task BioNNE-L on nested named entity linking in Russian and English. c) Task ELCardioCC on clinical coding in cardiology. d) Task GutBrainIE on gut-brain interplay information extraction. In this edition of BioASQ, 83 competing teams participated with more than 1000 distinct submissions in total for the six different shared tasks of the challenge. Similar to previous editions, several participating systems achieved competitive performance, indicating the continuous advancement of the state-of-the-art in the field.