Overview of BioASQ 2026: The fourteenth BioASQ Challenge on Large-Scale Biomedical Semantic Indexing and Question Answering

2026-09-30

AI Summary

This work addresses the evaluation challenges of semantic indexing, information extraction, and question answering in biomedical text processing through the 14th BioASQ challenge. The initiative introduces six innovative shared tasks, encompassing multilingual clinical abstracts, nested entity-relation extraction, and cardiology coding. By integrating state-of-the-art methodologies in natural language processing, semantic indexing, automatic question answering, and text summarization, the challenge systematically evaluates existing techniques for biomedical language understanding. The competition attracted 87 participating teams, which collectively submitted over one thousand system runs. Numerous submissions achieved highly competitive performance across multiple evaluation metrics. Ultimately, this large-scale benchmarking effort significantly advances technological progress and methodological innovation within the field of biomedical natural language processing.

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of the fourteenth edition of the BioASQ challenge, organized in the context of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF) 2026. BioASQ is an international challenge series that supports progress in biomedical language processing tasks ranging from semantic indexing and information extraction to question answering and summarization. In 2026, BioASQ included six shared tasks: a) Task 14b on biomedical semantic question answering. b) Task Synergy14 on question answering for developing biomedical top- ics. c) Task MultiClinSum-2 on multilingual clinical summarization. d) Task BioNNE-R on extracting relations between nested named entities in Russian and English. e) Task ELCardioCC on clinical coding in cardiology. f) Task GutBrainIE on gut-brain interplay information extrac- tion. Across these six tasks, 87 distinct teams participated, submitting more than 1000 runs overall. As in previous editions, several submissions reached competitive performance, reflecting the continued progress of state-of-the-art methods across biomedical language processing tasks.

Problem

• Biomedical Semantic Indexing
• Question Answering
• Clinical Summarization
• Information Extraction
• BioASQ Challenge

Innovation

• Biomedical Question Answering
• Semantic Indexing
• Multilingual Clinical Summarization
• Nested Named Entity Relation Extraction
• BioASQ Challenge