Papers › BIOMRC: A Dataset for Biomedical Machine Reading Comprehension

BIOMRC: A Dataset for Biomedical Machine Reading Comprehension

13 May 2020WS 2020 7arXiv:2005.06376archive 2025-07-28

Petros Stavropoulos, Dimitris Pappas, Ion Androutsopoulos, Ryan Mcdonald

We introduce BIOMRC, a large-scale cloze-style biomedical MRC dataset. Care was taken to reduce noise, compared to the previous BIOREAD dataset of Pappas et al. (2018). Experiments show that simple heuristics do not perform well on the new dataset, and that two neural MRC models that had been tested on BIOREAD perform much better on BIOMRC, indicating that the new dataset is indeed less noisy or at least that its task is more feasible. Non-expert human performance is also higher on the new dataset compared to BIOREAD, and biomedical experts perform even better. We also introduce a new BERT-based MRC model, the best version of which substantially outperforms all other methods tested, reaching or surpassing the accuracy of biomedical experts in some experiments. We make the new dataset available in three different sizes, also releasing our code, and providing a leaderboard.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

PetrosStav/BioMRC_code mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Machine Reading ComprehensionReading Comprehension

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

BIOMRC

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections