Team from AUEB's Department of Informatics wins BioASQ prize
A team from AUEB's was awarded a prize at the international challenge of biomedical question answering systems . The team consisted of the graduate students Polyvios Liosis and George Brokos from AUEB's , the PhD student Dimitris Pappas (also affiliated with the ), Google's visiting researcher and Assoc. Prof. Ion Androutsopoulos. Systems participating in the challenge receive English questions formulated by biomedical experts and attempt, among other tasks, to retrieve relevant scientific articles, as well as specific snippets of the articles that answer the questions.
AUEB's team had the best document retrieval in three of the five evaluation batches (each batch contained 100 questions) and the best snippet retrieval in all five batches.听The team used deep neural network methods (deep learning) developed at the of the of AUEB's Department of Informatics (, , , ).
The annual provides datasets, evaluation infrastructure and sub-challenges intended to foster the development of Artificial Intelligence methods that will help biomedical experts extract relevant information from the evergrowing scientific literature and specialized databases. The BioASQ challenge started as a European research project (FP7 ICT, 2012-14) coordinated by the . AUEB participated in the research project and played a central role in the organization of the question answering sub-challenges. Since 2015, the BioASQ challenge continues with funding mostly from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). This year, AUEB participated as a contestant, along with a total of 26 teams from 11 countries. The prize was awarded at the BioASQ workshop of the .
