Team from AUEB's Department of Informatics wins BioASQ prize
A team of was awarded a prize at the international challenge of biomedical question answering systems 2019, for a second time, following last year's prize of AUEB鈥檚 team at the same challenge. This year's team was coordinated by Dimitris Pappas, who is a PhD student in AUEB's Department of Informatics, member of and is also affiliated with the . This year's team also comprised George Brokos, who is a graduate of program and member of AUEB鈥檚 NLP Group, Google's researcher , who is a also an associate researcher of AUEB's NLP Group, and Assoc. Prof. Ion Androutsopoulos, head of AUEB鈥檚 NLP Group.
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 in the four evaluation batches it participated in. Each batch contained 100 questions. The team used deep neural network methods (deep learning) developed at the NLP Group of the of AUEB's Department of Informatics ().
The annual BioASQ challenge 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's NLP Group 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 research organizations and the industry. In 2018 and this year, AUEB participated as a contestant. This year鈥檚 prizes were awarded at the BioASQ workshop of the (ECML-PKDD).
