MSc student Margarida Campos and senior researcher Francisco M. Couto represented LASIGE in the Task b-Phase B of the BioASQ9 challenge.

BioASQ organizes international challenges on biomedical semantic indexing and question answering (QA). The challenges include tasks relevant to hierarchical text classification, machine learning, information retrieval, QA from texts and structured data, multi-document summarization and many other areas.

The BioASQ9 Task b goal was to respond with relevant concepts, articles, snippets and RDF triples, from designated resources, as well as exact and ‘ideal’ answers. It comprised two phases: Phase A, which consisted in the retrieval of the required information, and B, which consisted in answering the question. The LASIGE team participated in Phase B, having taken first place in the second test batch. The full results for that task are available here, and the challenge is still going on with new batches.

Margarida Campos is currently developing work on the FCT financed project DeST, lead by Francisco Couto.