As we enter year three of a global pandemic (!), the need for high-performing BioNER systems has never been higher—they’re fundamental in text mining systems that facilitate COVID-19 studies.

Applying NER to the biomedical domain is challenging. Data is often not freely available, annotation of data requires expert knowledge, and the space of biomedical concepts is enormous.

In his article for Towards Data Science, Sybren Jansen, Slimmer AI senior machine learning engineer and Head of AI Innovation provides an extensive overview of BioNER research to help tackle these challenges, and talks through the importance of transfer and multi-task learning.