BioASQ-QA: A manually curated corpus for Biomedical Question Answering

The BioASQ question answering (QA) benchmark dataset contains questions in English, along with golden standard (reference) answers and related material. The dataset has been designed to reflect real information needs of biomedical experts and is therefore more realistic and challenging than most existing datasets. Furthermore, unlike most previous QA benchmarks that contain only exact answers, the BioASQ-QA dataset also includes ideal answers (in effect summaries), which are particularly useful for research on multi-document summarization. The dataset combines structured and unstructured data. The materials linked with each question comprise documents and snippets, which are useful for Information Retrieval and Passage Retrieval experiments, as well as concepts that are useful in concept-to-text Natural Language Generation. Researchers working on paraphrasing and textual entailment can also measure the degree to which their methods improve the performance of biomedical QA systems. Last but not least, the dataset is continuously extended, as the BioASQ challenge is running and new data are generated.