Home > Personnel > Asma Ben Abacha

Asma Ben Abacha

Asma
Ben Abacha
,
PhD
Research Scientist
Location: 
38A
/
10N1003N
Phone Number: (
301
) 
827-4737
E-mail: 
asma.benabacha@nih.gov
Expertise and Research Interests: 

Dr. Ben Abacha is a research 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/Tools by Asma Ben Abacha: 
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.
Abstract | PMID:  31592532 | PMCID:  PMC7025352
Abstract
Savery M, Ben Abacha A, Gayen S, Demner-Fushman D. Question-Driven Summarization of Answers to Consumer Health Questions. arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.09067.
Abstract | URL:  https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.09067
AbstractExternal link
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.
Abstract | URL:  https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.alvr-1.3.pdf
AbstractExternal link
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.
Abstract | URL:  https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-45442-5_69
AbstractExternal link
Ben Abacha A, Demner-Fushman D. A Question-Entailment Approach to Question Answering. arXiv:1901.08079.
Abstract | URL:  https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.08079
AbstractExternal link
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.
Abstract | pub9992.pdf
AbstractDownload
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.
Abstract | PMID:  31592532 | URL:  https://doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocz152
AbstractExternal link
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.
Abstract | pub9965.pdf
AbstractDownload
Ben Abacha A, Mrabet Y, Sharp M, Goodwin T, Shooshan S, Demner-Fushman D. Bridging the Gap Between Consumers' Medication Questions and Trusted Answers. Studies in health technology and informatics, 264, pp.25-29, 2019.
Abstract | PMID:  31437878 | URL:  https://doi.org/10.3233/SHTI190176
AbstractExternal link
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.
Abstract | pub9964.pdf
AbstractDownload
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.
Abstract | URL:  https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W19-5039.pdf
AbstractExternal link
Ben Abacha A, Demner-Fushman D. On the Summarization of Consumer Health Questions. ACL 2019, Florence, Italy.
Abstract | URL:  https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P19-1215.pdf
AbstractExternal link
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.
Abstract | pub9963.pdf
AbstractDownload
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.
Abstract | pub9998.pdf | PMID:  31258963 | PMCID:  PMC6568117
AbstractDownload
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
Abstract | URL:  https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-15719-7_40
AbstractExternal link
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.
Abstract | pub9923.pdf
AbstractDownload
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.
Abstract | pub9917.pdf
AbstractDownload
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.
Abstract | PMID:  30457565 | PMCID:  PMC6244189
Abstract
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).
Abstract | pub9812.pdf
AbstractDownload
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.
Abstract | PMID:  29409442 | PMCID:  PMC5802048
Abstract
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
Abstract | URL:  https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8218002
AbstractExternal link
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.
Abstract | pub9539.pdf
AbstractDownload
Ben Abacha A, Agichtein E, Pinter Y, Demner-Fushman D. Overview of the Medical QA Task @ TREC 2017 LiveQA Track. TREC, Gaithersburg, MD, 2017.
Abstract | pub9773.pdf
AbstractDownload
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.
Abstract | pub9500.pdf | PMID:  28269825 | PMCID:  PMC5333286
AbstractDownload
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.
Abstract | pub9455.pdf
AbstractDownload
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.
Abstract | pub9489.pdf
AbstractDownload
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.
Abstract | pub9538.pdf
AbstractDownload
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.
Abstract
Abstract
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)
Abstract | 1_IJCLA.pdf
AbstractDownload
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.
Abstract | pub9349.pdf
AbstractDownload
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