Overview of BioASQ 2022: The tenth BioASQ challenge on Large-Scale Biomedical Semantic Indexing and Question Answering

TL;DR

The paper summarizes the tenth BioASQ challenge, highlighting advancements in biomedical semantic indexing and question answering through multiple tasks, including a new disease annotation task in Spanish, with many systems outperforming baselines.

Contribution

It introduces a new task for disease annotation in Spanish and reports on the participation and progress in biomedical semantic indexing and QA systems.

Findings

Over 170 systems participated across four tasks.

Most systems outperformed strong baselines.

Continued progress in biomedical semantic indexing and QA.

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of the tenth edition of the BioASQ challenge in the context of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF) 2022. BioASQ is an ongoing series of challenges that promotes advances in the domain of large-scale biomedical semantic indexing and question answering. In this edition, the challenge was composed of the three established tasks a, b, and Synergy, and a new task named DisTEMIST for automatic semantic annotation and grounding of diseases from clinical content in Spanish, a key concept for semantic indexing and search engines of literature and clinical records. This year, BioASQ received more than 170 distinct systems from 38 teams in total for the four different tasks of the challenge. As in previous years, the majority of the competing systems outperformed the strong baselines, indicating the continuous advancement of the state-of-the-art in this domain.