Evidence map›Paper›PMID 25925131›Full record

ArticleBMC bioinformatics2015

An overview of the BIOASQ large-scale biomedical semantic indexing and question answering competition.

George Tsatsaronis, Georgios Balikas, Prodromos Malakasiotis, Ioannis Partalas, Matthias Zschunke, Michael R Alvers, Dirk Weissenborn, Anastasia Krithara, Sergios Petridis, Dimitris Polychronopoulos and 12 more

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in BMC bioinformatics, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 100 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
100citing papers in PubMed, 1 pooled it
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

100 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.

  1. Question answering systems for health professionals at the point of care-a systematic review.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2024
    Pooled it
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  7. A critical evaluation of generative query expansion on biomedical literature retrieval.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2026
    Article
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  11. A survey on large language models in biology and chemistry.Experimental & molecular medicine · 2026
    Review
  12. Large language models for bioinformatics.Quantitative biology (Beijing, China) · 2026
    Review
  13. Article
  14. Article
  15. Article
  16. MedHopper: an agentic RAG-LLM system for multi-hop biomedical QA.Database : the journal of biological databases and curation · 2026
    Article
  17. Article
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  20. Article

40 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.

4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

22 authors.

George TsatsaronisBiotechnology Center, TU Dresden, 01307, Tatzberg 47-49, Dresden, Germany. george.tsatsaronis@biotec.tu-dresden.de.
Georgios BalikasUniversité Pierre et Marie Curie-Paris 6, 4 Place Jussieu, Paris, 75005, France. georgios.balikas@imag.fr.
Prodromos MalakasiotisAthens University of Economics and Business, Patission 76, Athens, 10434, Greece. rulller@gmail.com.
Ioannis PartalasUniversité Joseph Fourier, 621 Avenue Centrale, Saint-Martin-d'Héres, 38041, France. ioannis.partalas@imag.fr.
Matthias ZschunkeTransinsight GmbH, Tatzberg 47-49, Dresden, 01307, Germany. mzschunke@transinsight.com.
Michael R AlversTransinsight GmbH, Tatzberg 47-49, Dresden, 01307, Germany. malvers@transinsight.com.
Dirk WeissenbornBiotechnology Center, TU Dresden, 01307, Tatzberg 47-49, Dresden, Germany. dirk.weissenborn@gmail.com.
Anastasia KritharaNCSR Demokritos, Ag. Paraskevi, Athens, 60228, Greece. akrithara@iit.demokritos.gr.
Sergios PetridisNCSR Demokritos, Ag. Paraskevi, Athens, 60228, Greece. eserxio@gmail.com.
Dimitris PolychronopoulosNCSR Demokritos, Ag. Paraskevi, Athens, 60228, Greece. dpolychr@gmail.com.
Yannis AlmirantisNCSR Demokritos, Ag. Paraskevi, Athens, 60228, Greece. yalmir@bio.demokritos.gr.
John PavlopoulosAthens University of Economics and Business, Patission 76, Athens, 10434, Greece. annis@aueb.gr.
Nicolas BaskiotisUniversité Pierre et Marie Curie-Paris 6, 4 Place Jussieu, Paris, 75005, France. nicolas.baskiotis@lip6.fr.
Patrick GallinariUniversité Pierre et Marie Curie-Paris 6, 4 Place Jussieu, Paris, 75005, France. Patrick.Gallinari@lip6.fr.
Thierry ArtiéresUniversité Pierre et Marie Curie-Paris 6, 4 Place Jussieu, Paris, 75005, France. thierry.artieres@lip6.fr.
Axel-Cyrille Ngonga NgomoUniversität Leipzig, Augustusplatz 10, 04109, Leipzig, Germany. axel.ngonga@gmail.com.
Norman HeinoUniversität Leipzig, Augustusplatz 10, 04109, Leipzig, Germany. heino@informatik.uni-leipzig.de.
Eric GaussierUniversité Joseph Fourier, 621 Avenue Centrale, Saint-Martin-d'Héres, 38041, France. eric.gaussier@imag.fr.
Liliana Barrio-AlversTransinsight GmbH, Tatzberg 47-49, Dresden, 01307, Germany. lalvers@transinsight.com.
Michael SchroederBiotechnology Center, TU Dresden, 01307, Tatzberg 47-49, Dresden, Germany. ms@biotec.tu-dresden.de.
Ion AndroutsopoulosAthens University of Economics and Business, Patission 76, Athens, 10434, Greece. ion@aueb.gr.
Georgios PaliourasNCSR Demokritos, Ag. Paraskevi, Athens, 60228, Greece. paliourg@iit.demokritos.gr.

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

backgroundThis article provides an overview of the first BIOASQ challenge, a competition on large-scale biomedical semantic indexing and question answering (QA), which took place between March and September 2013. BIOASQ assesses the ability of systems to semantically index very large numbers of biomedical scientific articles, and to return concise and user-understandable answers to given natural language questions by combining information from biomedical articles and ontologies.

resultsThe 2013 BIOASQ competition comprised two tasks, Task 1a and Task 1b. In Task 1a participants were asked to automatically annotate new PUBMED documents with MESH headings. Twelve teams participated in Task 1a, with a total of 46 system runs submitted, and one of the teams performing consistently better than the MTI indexer used by NLM to suggest MESH headings to curators. Task 1b used benchmark datasets containing 29 development and 282 test English questions, along with gold standard (reference) answers, prepared by a team of biomedical experts from around Europe and participants had to automatically produce answers. Three teams participated in Task 1b, with 11 system runs. The BIOASQ infrastructure, including benchmark datasets, evaluation mechanisms, and the results of the participants and baseline methods, is publicly available.

conclusionsA publicly available evaluation infrastructure for biomedical semantic indexing and QA has been developed, which includes benchmark datasets, and can be used to evaluate systems that: assign MESH headings to published articles or to English questions; retrieve relevant RDF triples from ontologies, relevant articles and snippets from PUBMED Central; produce "exact" and paragraph-sized "ideal" answers (summaries). The results of the systems that participated in the 2013 BIOASQ competition are promising. In Task 1a one of the systems performed consistently better from the NLM's MTI indexer. In Task 1b the systems received high scores in the manual evaluation of the "ideal" answers; hence, they produced high quality summaries as answers. Overall, BIOASQ helped obtain a unified view of how techniques from text classification, semantic indexing, document and passage retrieval, question answering, and text summarization can be combined to allow biomedical experts to obtain concise, user-understandable answers to questions reflecting their real information needs.

Indexed as

AlgorithmsMedical Subject HeadingsNatural Language ProcessingPubMedSemanticsSoftwareAbstracting and IndexingHumansNational Library of Medicine (U.S.)United States

Identifiers

PMID25925131
PMCPMC4450488

What OpenQuestion holds

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LicenceCC BY
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Registered trials

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.