Enhanced Reasoning for Biomedical Document-Level Relation Extraction via a Novel Cascade Language Model Framework

Haohua Song, Wenhao Gu, Zhijing Li, Yunwenyu, Tiantian Zhu, Xiao Yang, Zexuan Zhu


Abstract
Biomedical document-level relation extraction poses significant challenges beyond sentence-level tasks, as it necessitates the integration of evidence from entire documents and the ability for coherent cross-sentence reasoning. While pretrained language models (PLMs) demonstrate efficiency in handling local contexts, they often struggle with global dependency modeling. Conversely, large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong reasoning capabilities but tend to generate hallucinations in knowledge-intensive biomedical domains. This paper introduces CoRE, a novel cascade framework that leverages the complementary strengths of PLMs and LLMs through a detect-then-rethink paradigm. The PLM serves as an efficient detector for high-confidence relations, while challenging cases are forwarded to an LLM enhanced with semantic retrieval and iterative reasoning mechanisms. Experimental results on BioRED and CDR datasets show that CoRE achieves substantial improvements over state-of-the-art baselines, validating the effectiveness of the proposed cascade paradigm for complex biomedical relation extraction.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.1517
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
32865–32879
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1517/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Haohua Song, Wenhao Gu, Zhijing Li, Yunwenyu, Tiantian Zhu, Xiao Yang, and Zexuan Zhu. 2026. Enhanced Reasoning for Biomedical Document-Level Relation Extraction via a Novel Cascade Language Model Framework. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 32865–32879, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enhanced Reasoning for Biomedical Document-Level Relation Extraction via a Novel Cascade Language Model Framework (Song et al., ACL 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1517.pdf
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