Expertise and Research Interests:

Dr. Ben Abacha is a staff scientist at the Lister Hill Center, U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), National Institutes of Health (NIH). Prior to joining the NLM, she was a researcher at the LIST in Luxembourg and part-time lecturer at the university of Lorraine in France. Dr. Ben Abacha has received a Ph.D. in computer science from Paris-Sud University, France (2012), a research master's degree from Paris 13 University, France (2008), and a software engineering degree from ENSI, Tunisia (2007). She is working on medical question answering, visual question answering, and NLP related projects. Website, Google Scholar, DBLP

Honors and Awards:

Dr. Ben Abacha has received two service group awards from the NLM in 2017 and 2018.

Publications:

Yadav S, Gupta D, Ben Abacha A, Demner-Fushman D. Reinforcement Learning for Abstractive Question Summarization with Question-aware Semantic Rewards. The 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2021).

Ben Abacha A, Datla V, Hasan S, Demner-Fuschman D, Muller H. Overview of the VQA-Med Task at ImageCLEF 2020: Visual Question Answering and Generation in the Medical Domain. CLEF 2020.

Demner-Fushman D, Mrabet Y, Ben Abacha A. Consumer health information and question answering: helping consumers find answers to their health-related information needs. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 2020: 27 (2), 194-201.

Savery M, Ben Abacha A, Gayen S, Demner-Fushman D. Question-Driven Summarization of Answers to Consumer Health Questions. arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.09067.

Sarrouti M, Ben Abacha A, Demner-Fushman D. Visual Question Generation from Radiology Images. Proceedings of the First Workshop on Advances in Language and Vision Research.

Ionescu B, Müller H, Péteri R, Dang-Nguyen DT, Zhou L, Piras L, Riegler M, Halvorsen P, Tran MT, Lux M, Gurrin C, Chamberlain J, Clark A, Campello A, de Herrera AGS, Ben Abacha A, Datla VV, Hasan SA, Liu J, Demner-Fushman D, Pelka O, Friedrich CM, Cid YD, Kozlovski S, Liauchuk V, Kovalev V, Berari P, Brie P, Fichou D, Dogariu M, Stefan L, Constantin M. ImageCLEF 2020: Multimedia Retrieval in Lifelogging, Medical, Nature, and Internet Applications. ImageCLEF 2020: Multimedia Retrieval in Lifelogging, Medical, Nature, and Internet Applications. ECIR (2) 2020: 533-541.

Ben Abacha A, Demner-Fushman D. A Question-Entailment Approach to Question Answering. arXiv:1901.08079.

Ben Abacha A, Hasan SA, Datls W, Liu J, Demner-Fushman D, Muller H. VQA-Med: Overview of the medical visual question answering task at imageclef 2019. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, 9-12, 2019.

Demner-Fushman D, Mrabet Y, Ben Abacha A. Consumer health information and question answering: helping consumers find answers to their health-related information needs. JAMIA, 2019.

Ben Abacha A, Mrabet Y, Sharp M, Goodwin T, Shooshan S, Demner-Fushman D. Bridging the Gap Between Consumers’ Medication Questions and Trusted Answers. Stud Health Technol Inform. 2019 Aug 21;264:25-29. doi: 10.3233/SHTI190176.

Ben Abacha A, Shivade C, Demner-Fushman D. Overview of the MEDIQA 2019 Shared Task on Textual Inference, Question Entailment and Question Answering. Proceedings of the 18th BioNLP Workshop and Shared Task, Florence, Italy, August 1, 2019.

Ben Abacha A, Shivade C, Demner-Fushman D. Overview of the MEDIQA 2019 Shared Task on Textual Inference, Question Entailment and Question Answering. . Proceedings of the BioNLP 2019 workshop.

Ben Abacha A, Demner-Fushman D. On the Summarization of Consumer Health Questions. ACL 2019, Florence, Italy.

Ben Abacha A, Demner-Fushman D. On the Summarization of Consumer Health Questions. Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Florence, Italy 2019.

Ben Abacha A, Demner-Fushman D. On the Role of Question Summarization and Information Source Restriction in Consumer Health Question Answering. AMIA Informatics Summit, March 2019.

Ionescu B, Muller H, Peteri R, Dang-Nguyen DT, Piras L, Riegler M, Tran MT, Lux M, Gurrin C, Cid YD, Liauchuk V, Kovalev V, Ben Abacha A, Hasan SA, Datla V, Liu J, Demner-Fushman D, Pelka O, Friedrich CM, Chamberlain J, Clark C, de Herrera AGS, Garcia N, Kavallieratou E, del Blanco CR, Rodriguez CC, Vasillopoulos N, Karampidis K. Multimedia retrieval in medicine, lifelogging, security and nature. International Conference of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum for European Languages, Springer, Cham, 358-386, 2019

Ben Abacha A, Demner-Fushman D. On the Role of Question Summarization and Information Source Restriction in Consumer Health Question Answering. Proceedings of the AMIA 2019 Informatics Summit, San Francisco, CA, USA, March 25-28, 2019.

Ben Abacha A, Demner-Fushman D. On the role of question summarization and information source restriction in consumer health question answering. . In Proceedings of the AMIA 2019 Informatics Summit, San Francisco, CA, USA, 2019.

Lau JJ, Gayen S, Ben Abacha A, Demner-Fushman D. A dataset of clinically generated visual questions and answers about radiology images. Sci Data. 2018 Nov 20;5:180251. doi: 10.1038/sdata.2018.251.

Ben Abacha A, Gayen S, Lau JJ, Rajaraman S, Demner-Fushman D. NLM at ImageCLEF 2018 Visual Question Answering in the Medical Domain. CLEF2018 Working Notes. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Avignon, France, CEUR-WS.org (September 10-14 2018).

Kilicoglu H, Ben Abacha A, Mrabet Y, Shooshan SE, Rodriguez L, Masterton K, Demner-Fushman D. Semantic annotation of consumer health questions. BMC Bioinformatics. 2018 Feb 6;19(1):34. doi: 10.1186/s12859-018-2045-1.

Ben Abacha A, Long LR, Seco de Herrera AG, Antani SK, Wang K, Demner-Fushman D. Named Entity Recognition in Functional Neuroimaging Literature. BIBM 2017

Ben Abacha A, De Herrera A, Gayen S, Demner-Fushman D, Antani SK. NLM at ImageCLEF 2017 Caption Task. International Conference of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum for European Languages 2017 Sep 11 (pp. 358-360). Springer, Cham.

Ben Abacha A, Agichtein E, Pinter Y, Demner-Fushman D. Overview of the Medical QA Task @ TREC 2017 LiveQA Track. TREC, Gaithersburg, MD, 2017.

Ben Abacha A, Demner-Fushman D. Recognizing Question Entailment for Medical Question Answering. AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2017 Feb 10;2016:310-318. eCollection 2016.

Chachra S, Ben Abacha A, Shooshan SE, Rodriguez L, Demner-Fushman D. A Hybrid Approach to Generation of Missing Abstracts in Biomedical Literature. Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers: 1093-1100.

Ben Abacha A. NLM_NIH at TREC 2016 Clinical Decision Support Track. Proceedings of TREC 2016, the 25th Text Retrieval Conference, Gaithersburg, MD, USA, November 2016.

Ben Abacha A, Demner-Fushman D. NLM_NIH at SemEval-2017 Task 3: from Question Entailment to Question Similarity for Community Question Answering. In Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval@ACL) 2017: 349-352.

Ben Abacha A, de Herrera A, Wang Ke, Long LR, Antani SK, Demner-Fushman D. Named entity recognition in functional neuroimaging literature. 2017 IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM), Kansas City, MO, 2017, pp. 2218-2220.

Ben Abacha A, Demner-Fushman D. Meta-Learning with Selective Data Augmentation for Medical Entity Recognition. International Journal of Computational Linguistics and Applications (IJCLA) 7(2): 167-182 (2016)

Kilicoglu H, Ben Abacha A, Mrabet Y, Roberts K, Rodriguez L, Shooshan SE, Demner-Fushman D. Annotating named entities in consumer health questions. LREC,23-28 May 2016, Portorož.