English

BeLink: Biomedical Entity Linking Meets Generative Re-Ranking

Computation and Language 2026-05-22 v1 Artificial Intelligence Information Retrieval

Abstract

Despite recent progress, Biomedical Entity Linking (BEL) with large language models (LLMs) remains computationally inefficient and challenging to deploy in practical settings. In this work, we demonstrate that instruction-tuning of open-source generative models can offer an effective solution when applied at the re-ranking stage of the BEL pipeline. We propose a set-wise instruction-tuning formulation that enables fast and accurate candidate selection. Our method demonstrates strong performance on multiple BEL benchmarks, yielding significant improvements in linking accuracy (3%-24%) while reducing inference time compared to the state-of-the-art. We integrate our generative re-ranker into BeLink, a modular, end-to-end system designed for practical real-world BEL applications.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.22501,
  title  = {BeLink: Biomedical Entity Linking Meets Generative Re-Ranking},
  author = {Darya Shlyk and Stefano Montanelli and Lawrence Hunter},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.22501},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted to ACM SIGIR 2026