HILGEN: Hierarchically-Informed Data Generation for Biomedical NER Using Knowledgebases and Large Language Models

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Main Authors: Ge, Yao, Guo, Yuting, Das, Sudeshna, Rajwal, Swati, Bozkurt, Selen, Sarker, Abeed
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Ge, Yao
Guo, Yuting
Das, Sudeshna
Rajwal, Swati
Bozkurt, Selen
Sarker, Abeed
author_facet Ge, Yao
Guo, Yuting
Das, Sudeshna
Rajwal, Swati
Bozkurt, Selen
Sarker, Abeed
contents We present HILGEN, a Hierarchically-Informed Data Generation approach that combines domain knowledge from the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) with synthetic data generated by large language models (LLMs), specifically GPT-3.5. Our approach leverages UMLS's hierarchical structure to expand training data with related concepts, while incorporating contextual information from LLMs through targeted prompts aimed at automatically generating synthetic examples for sparsely occurring named entities. The performance of the HILGEN approach was evaluated across four biomedical NER datasets (MIMIC III, BC5CDR, NCBI-Disease, and Med-Mentions) using BERT-Large and DANN (Data Augmentation with Nearest Neighbor Classifier) models, applying various data generation strategies, including UMLS, GPT-3.5, and their best ensemble. For the BERT-Large model, incorporating UMLS led to an average F1 score improvement of 40.36%, while using GPT-3.5 resulted in a comparable average increase of 40.52%. The Best-Ensemble approach using BERT-Large achieved the highest improvement, with an average increase of 42.29%. DANN model's F1 score improved by 22.74% on average using the UMLS-only approach. The GPT-3.5-based method resulted in a 21.53% increase, and the Best-Ensemble DANN model showed a more notable improvement, with an average increase of 25.03%. Our proposed HILGEN approach improves NER performance in few-shot settings without requiring additional manually annotated data. Our experiments demonstrate that an effective strategy for optimizing biomedical NER is to combine biomedical knowledge curated in the past, such as the UMLS, and generative LLMs to create synthetic training instances. Our future research will focus on exploring additional innovative synthetic data generation strategies for further improving NER performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_04930
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle HILGEN: Hierarchically-Informed Data Generation for Biomedical NER Using Knowledgebases and Large Language Models
Ge, Yao
Guo, Yuting
Das, Sudeshna
Rajwal, Swati
Bozkurt, Selen
Sarker, Abeed
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
We present HILGEN, a Hierarchically-Informed Data Generation approach that combines domain knowledge from the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) with synthetic data generated by large language models (LLMs), specifically GPT-3.5. Our approach leverages UMLS's hierarchical structure to expand training data with related concepts, while incorporating contextual information from LLMs through targeted prompts aimed at automatically generating synthetic examples for sparsely occurring named entities. The performance of the HILGEN approach was evaluated across four biomedical NER datasets (MIMIC III, BC5CDR, NCBI-Disease, and Med-Mentions) using BERT-Large and DANN (Data Augmentation with Nearest Neighbor Classifier) models, applying various data generation strategies, including UMLS, GPT-3.5, and their best ensemble. For the BERT-Large model, incorporating UMLS led to an average F1 score improvement of 40.36%, while using GPT-3.5 resulted in a comparable average increase of 40.52%. The Best-Ensemble approach using BERT-Large achieved the highest improvement, with an average increase of 42.29%. DANN model's F1 score improved by 22.74% on average using the UMLS-only approach. The GPT-3.5-based method resulted in a 21.53% increase, and the Best-Ensemble DANN model showed a more notable improvement, with an average increase of 25.03%. Our proposed HILGEN approach improves NER performance in few-shot settings without requiring additional manually annotated data. Our experiments demonstrate that an effective strategy for optimizing biomedical NER is to combine biomedical knowledge curated in the past, such as the UMLS, and generative LLMs to create synthetic training instances. Our future research will focus on exploring additional innovative synthetic data generation strategies for further improving NER performance.
title HILGEN: Hierarchically-Informed Data Generation for Biomedical NER Using Knowledgebases and Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.04930