REMINDER: BioASQ challenge on biomedical IR, QA, summarization (task 1b) about to start

Date(s): 
Wednesday, June 26, 2013

The second task of the BioASQ challenge (Task 1B: biomedical question answering) will start on Wednesday June 19, 2013 June 26, 2013. The task is related to:

  • information retrieval, including document and snippet retrieval,
  • question answering for document collections and ontologies,
  • summarization from documents and structured information.

Task 1B will use benchmark datasets containing English questions and gold standard (reference) answers. The datasets are being constructed by a team of biomedical experts from around Europe. Task 1B will run in two phases:

  • Phase A: BioASQ will release questions from the benchmark datasets. The participants will have to respond with relevant concepts (from designated terminologies and ontologies), relevant articles (in English, from designated article repositories), relevant snippets (from the relevant articles), and relevant RDF triples (from designated ontologies).
  • Phase B: BioASQ will release questions and gold (correct) relevant concepts, articles, snippets, and RDF triples from the benchmark datasets. The participants will have to respond with “exact” answers (e.g., named entities in the case of factoid questions) and “ideal” answers (paragraph-sized summaries), both in English.

It is allowed to participate in both or only one of the phases, and in each phase it is allowed to return all or only some of the expected answers (e.g., only snippets in Phase A, only exact answers in Phase B).

A development dataset of 29 questions and gold answers is already available at: http://bioasq.lip6.fr/general_information/Task1b/#developmentDataset

To make participating in Task 1B easier, the task will run in three consecutive periods (batches), one every 3 weeks. It is allowed to participate in some or all of the batches.

Prizes will be awarded to the winners of each batch. Check the following page for more information: http://www.bioasq.org/participate/prizes

For each batch, first only the questions of the batch will be released, and the participants will have to submit their answers for Phase A (concepts, articles, snippets, RDF triples) within 24 hours; then the gold concepts, articles, snippets, and RDF triples for the questions of the batch will also be provided, and the participants will again have 24 hours to submit their answers for Phase B (“exact” and “ideal” answers of different types, depending on the question). More information about the task can be found at: http://bioasq.lip6.fr/general_information/Task1b/

Registration for Task 1B is open and will remain open until the end of the challenge in August. In order to register and participate, please visit the BioASQ participants area: http://bioasq.lip6.fr/

Important dates:

  • June 19, 2013 June 26, 2013: Start of Task 1B - first batch
  • July 10, 2013: Second batch of Task 1B
  • July 31, 2013: Third batch of Task 1B
  • September 27, 2013: BioASQ Workshop (post-conference workshop after CLEF 2013, Valencia, Spain).

Good luck from the BioASQ team!