The overview of the NLM-Chem BioCreative VII track: full-text chemical identification and indexing in PubMed articles

The BioCreative NLM-Chem track calls for a community effort to fine-tune automated recognition of chemical names in biomedical literature. Chemical names are one of the most searched biomedical entities in PubMed and – as highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic – their identification may significantly advance research in multiple biomedical subfields. While previous community challenges focused on identifying chemical names mentioned in titles and abstracts, the full text contains valuable additional detail. We organized the BioCreative NLM-Chem track to call for a community effort to address automated chemical entity recognition in full-text articles. The track consisted of two tasks: 1) Chemical Identification task, and 2) Chemical Indexing prediction task. For the Chemical Identification task, participants were expected to predict with high accuracy all chemicals mentioned in recently published full-text articles, both span (i.e., named entity recognition) and normalization (i.e., entity linking) using MeSH. For the Chemical Indexing task, participants identified which chemicals should be indexed as topics for the article's topic terms in the NLM article and indexing, i.e., appear in the listing of MeSH terms for the document.