BioASQ aims to push for a solution to the information access problem of biomedical experts, by tackling various tasks in the biomedical QA process:
1. large-scale classification of biomedical documents onto ontology concepts (semantic indexing),
2. classification of biomedical questions onto relevant concepts,
3. retrieval of relevant document snippets, concepts and knowledge base triples, and
4. delivery of the retrieved information in a concise and user-understandable form.

The aim of the BioASQ workshop is to bring experts from these domains together in order to push the research frontier towards hybrid information systems that will be able to deal with the whole diversity of the Web, especially for, but not restricted to the context of bio-medicine. During the workshop, the results of the BioASQ challenge will also be presented.

For the last seven years, the series of BioASQ challenges and workshops keeps providing an excellent opportunity for researchers around the world to communicate and discuss established and novel approaches on biomedical semantic indexing, information retrieval, knowledge extraction, and question answering.

Datasets

BioASQ provides and regularly updates benchmark datasets for both tasks of the BioASQ challenge:
• Task A on large-scale biomedical semantic indexing uses benchmark datasets consisting of more than 13,000,000 articles annotated with MeSH topics.
• Task B on biomedical information retrieval and question answering uses benchmark datasets consisting of more than 3,200 development and test questions along with gold standard annotations and answers.
All the datasets are available in the BioASQ participants' area platform http://participants-area.bioasq.org/

Topics

• Large-scale hierarchical text classification
• Large-scale classification of documents onto ontology concepts (semantic indexing)
• Classification of questions onto ontological concepts Scalable approaches to document clustering
• Text summarization, especially multi-document and query-focused summarization
• Verbalization of structured information and related queries (RDF, OWL, SPARQL, etc.)
• Question Answering over structured, semi-structured and unstructured data
• Reasoning for information retrieval and question answering
• Information retrieval over fragmented sources of information
• Efficient indexing and storage structures for information retrieval
• Delivery of the retrieved information in a concise and user-understandable form

Venue

The seventh BioASQ workshop will be held as an independent workshop at the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD 2019) in Würzburg, Germany.

Submission Guidelines

Papers must be written in English and formatted according to the Springer LNCS guidelines. Author instructions, style files and the copyright form can be downloaded here: https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines

All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference. The following paper categories are welcome:

• Long papers should consist of twelve to sixteen (12-16) pages, including references.
• Short papers should consist of six to nine (6-9) pages, including references.

Important dates

• June 14, 2019: Submission of Papers for BioASQ Workshop.
• July 19, 2019: Notification of Acceptance.
• July 26, 2019: Camera-Ready Copy of Papers for BioASQ Workshop.
• September 20, 2019: BioASQ workshop, at ECML PKDD 2019.

The important dates of the workshop can also be found here: http://bioasq.org/workshop/important_dates

Organizing committee

• Georgios Paliouras, NCSR "Demokritos", Greece and University of Houston, USA
• Anastasia Krithara, NCSR "Demokritos", Greece
• Anastasios Nentidis, NCSR "Demokritos", Greece and Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece