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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39975 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39975/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [DeBERTaV3: Improving DeBERTa using ELECTRA-Style Pre-Training with Gradient-Disentangled Embedding Sharing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09543/) (2021)
- [Domain-Specific Language Model Pretraining for Biomedical Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15779/) (2020)
- [Self-Alignment Pretraining for Biomedical Entity Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11784/) (2020)
- [LinkBERT: Pretraining Language Models with Document Links](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15827/) (2022)
- [Learning Dense Representations for Entity Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10506/) (2019)
- [Document-Level Relation Extraction with Adaptive Thresholding and Localized Context Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11304/) (2020)
- [EuroLLM: Multilingual Language Models for Europe](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16235/) (2024)
- [GLiNER: Generalist Model for Named Entity Recognition using Bidirectional Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08526/) (2023)
- [OpenNRE: An Open and Extensible Toolkit for Neural Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13078/) (2019)
- [NuNER: Entity Recognition Encoder Pre-training via LLM-Annotated Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15343/) (2024)
- [Overview of BioASQ 2021: The ninth BioASQ challenge on Large-Scale Biomedical Semantic Indexing and Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14885/) (2021)
- [Overview of BioASQ 2023: The eleventh BioASQ challenge on Large-Scale Biomedical Semantic Indexing and Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05131/) (2023)
- [Overview of BioASQ 2025: The Thirteenth BioASQ Challenge on Large-Scale Biomedical Semantic Indexing and Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20554/) (2025)
- [NEREL-BIO: A Dataset of Biomedical Abstracts Annotated with Nested Named Entities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11913/) (2022)
- [Overview of BioASQ 2022: The tenth BioASQ challenge on Large-Scale Biomedical Semantic Indexing and Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06852/) (2022)
- [Overview of BioASQ 2024: The twelfth BioASQ challenge on Large-Scale Biomedical Semantic Indexing and Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20532/) (2025)
- [A Domain-Specific Curated Benchmark for Entity and Document-Level Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04320/) (2026)
- [Cost-Pragmatic Quality Gating and Selection-Fusion Multi-Model Combiners for BioASQ Phases A+ and B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13551/) (2026)
- [Retrieval Augmented Biomedical Question Answering with Weak Question Recovery and Neural Reranking for BioASQ Task 14b](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01468/) (2026)
- [TWIX: a Two-Stage Approach for End-To-End Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.00832/) (2026)
- [BIT.UA at BioASQ 14B: Modular Retrieval with pg_textsearch and Qdrant, and Agent-Based Answer Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04999/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.