BLURB is a collection of resources for biomedical natural language processing. In general domains such as newswire and the Web, comprehensive benchmarks and leaderboards such as GLUE have greatly accelerated progress in open-domain NLP. In biomedicine, however, such resources are ostensibly scarce. In the past, there have been a plethora of shared tasks in biomedical NLP, such as BioCreative, BioNLP Shared Tasks, SemEval, and BioASQ, to name just a few. These efforts have played a significant role in fueling interest and progress by the research community, but they typically focus on individual tasks. The advent of neural language models such as BERTs provides a unifying foundation to leverage transfer learning from unlabeled text to support a wide range of NLP applications. To accelerate progress in biomedical pretraining strategies and task-specific methods, it is thus imperative to create a broad-coverage benchmark encompassing diverse biomedical tasks.
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