September 15, 2025
The Institute of Informatics & Telecommunications at NCSR Demokritos co-organised the 13th BioASQ workshop which took place at CLEF2025 in Madrid, Spain, on September 9-10, 2025.
This year, the BioASQ workshop had a record level of participation, with 20 oral presentations and 30 posters in total, due to a more than twofold increase in submissions.
Dr Anastasios Nentidis, Associate Researcher at IIT, together with Dr Anastasia Krithara, Researcher at IIT, gave a presentation titled Overview of BioASQ Tasks 13b and Synergy13 in CLEF2025.
The workshop also featured an invited talk by Prof. Ernestina Menasalvas Ruiz, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), titled “From Clinical Notes to Clinical Insights: Leveraging LLMs for Structured Extraction, Normalization, and Decision Support in Healthcare.”
Furthermore, in its thirteenth edition this year, the BioASQ challenge expanded to include six tasks spanning three document types and six languages. More details on the BioASQ tasks are available here: https://bioasq.org/
BioASQ has always had an educational dimension, with many students at various levels working with its datasets and participating in the challenge and workshop, often as part of their thesis projects. This year, however, BioASQ was integrated into the coursework of the “Advanced Information Retrieval” course at TU Wien, giving students the opportunity to work on information retrieval for biomedical question answering in the context of the task 13b. Fifteen student teams joined the BioASQ community to participate in international scientific shared tasks.
Finally, the 14th BioASQ workshop was announced, which will take place in the context of CLEF2026, at Jena, Germany, on 21-24 September 2026. This version will feature six tasks as well, extended to incorporate more data, more subtasks, and covering 10 languages in total.
