Unicage is willing to announce that it will take part of the LitCoin NLP Challenge in partnership with LASIGE, a research and development unit from the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon (FCUL), in the fields of Computer Science and Engineering.

The LitCoin NLP Challenge is an international competition part of the NASA Tournament Lab, hosted by NCATS (The National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences) with contributions from the National Library of Medicine (NLM). These institutions, in collaboration with bitgrit and CrowdPlat, have come together to bring a challenge where participants can deploy data-driven technology solutions with the goal of accelerating scientific research in medicine and ensure that data from biomedical publications can be maximally leveraged and reach a wide range of biomedical researchers.

Since this challenge requires the processing of considerable amounts of data, Unicage can be an important asset for an efficient solution. Unicage is a set of highly efficient commands that have been designed to allow high-speed processing of data whilst maintaining efficient memory and resource management. This way, it possible to develop a robust, yet flexible data processing pipeline in a modular way, capable of high performance and efficiency.

In addition, Unicage has joined with a team of top researchers from LASIGE, namely from the DeST (Deep Semantic Tagger) project team. The DeST project team has focus and expertise on several Natural Language Processing tasks, with several research conducted in this field applied to bioinformatics and the biomedical domains. This team has  participated in several international challenges, with top-performing text mining solutions. With this partnership, it will be possible to combine the best from the Unicage technology with state-of-the-art solutions developed for Natural Language Processing tasks. Additional information about the DeST project and LASIGE can be found in https://www.lasige.pt/project/dest and in https://www.lasige.pt/.

The LitCoin challenge will be held in two phases during December 2021 and February 2022. The final
winners shall be announced during March or April 2022. More details about this competition can be
found in: https://ncats.nih.gov/funding/challenges/litcoin