Márcia Barros, Pedro Ruas, Diana Sousa, and Francisco M. Couto participated in the Biomedical Linked Annotation Hackathon 7- BLAH7. The BLAH series is organized to promote collaboration for sharing and linking resources for biomedical literature annotation and mining. This year the proposed challenged aimed at devising “How far NLP can help fight Covid-19, if forces are joined?”.

The team presented the project Annotating a multilingual COVID-19-related corpus. The lack of datasets for training automatic extraction of knowledge from the increasing number of scientific publications about COVID-19 (particularly in languages other than English) was the motivation for the proposal. The presentation is available here. This project adds to the efforts of these LASIGE researchers to contribute to the understanding and management of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Due to the restriction imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the event was held virtually from January 18 to 22.