Overview of BioASQ 2020: The eighth BioASQ challenge on Large-Scale Biomedical Semantic Indexing and Question Answering

TL;DR

The paper provides an overview of the eighth BioASQ challenge, highlighting advancements in biomedical semantic indexing and question answering, including a new Spanish task, with top systems outperforming baselines.

Contribution

It introduces a new Spanish semantic indexing task and reports on the participation and performance of systems in the latest BioASQ challenge.

Findings

Top systems outperform strong baselines

Introduction of a new Spanish semantic indexing task

High participation with 34 teams and over 100 systems

Abstract

In this paper, we present an overview of the eighth edition of the BioASQ challenge, which ran as a lab in the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF) 2020. BioASQ is a series of challenges aiming at the promotion of systems and methodologies for large-scale biomedical semantic indexing and question answering. To this end, shared tasks are organized yearly since 2012, where different teams develop systems that compete on the same demanding benchmark datasets that represent the real information needs of experts in the biomedical domain. This year, the challenge has been extended with the introduction of a new task on medical semantic indexing in Spanish. In total, 34 teams with more than 100 systems participated in the three tasks of the challenge. As in previous years, the results of the evaluation reveal that the top-performing systems managed to outperform the strong baselines, which suggests that state-of-the-art systems keep pushing the frontier of research through continuous improvements.