This paper presents the results of the sixth edition of the BioASQ challenge. The BioASQ challenge aims at the promotion of systems and methodologies through the organization of a challenge on two tasks: semantic indexing and question answering. In total, 26 teams with more than 90 systems participated in this year’s challenge. As in previous years, the best systems were able to outperform the strong baselines. This suggests that state-of-the-art systems are continuously improving, pushing the frontier of research.

The goal of the BioASQ challenge is to engage researchers into creating cuttingedge biomedical information systems. Specifically, it aims at the promotion of systems and methodologies that are able to deal with a plethora of different tasks in the biomedical domain. This is achieved through the organization of challenges. The fifth challenge consisted of three tasks: semantic indexing, question answering and a new task on information extraction. In total, 29 teams with more than 95 systems participated in the challenge. Overall, as in previous years, the best systems were able to outperform the strong baselines. This suggests that state-of-the art systems are continuously improving, pushing the frontier of research.