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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This paper introduces FrenchMedMCQA, the first publicly available Multiple-Choice Question Answering (MCQA) dataset in French for medical domain. It is composed of 3,105 questions taken from real exams of the French medical specialization diploma in pharmacy, mixing single and multiple answers. Each instance of the dataset contains an identifier, a question, five possible answers and their manual correction(s). We also propose first baseline models to automatically process this MCQA task in order to report on the current performances and to highlight the difficulty of the task. A detailed analysis of the results showed that it is necessary to have representations adapted to the medical domain or to the MCQA task: in our case, English specialized models yielded better results than generic French ones, even though FrenchMedMCQA is in French. Corpus, models and tools are available online.
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