MedPath: Multi-Domain Cross-Vocabulary Hierarchical Paths for Biomedical Entity Linking

Nishant Mishra, Wilker Aziz, Iacer Calixto


Abstract
Progress in biomedical Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Entity Linking (EL) is currently hindered by a fragmented data landscape, a lack of resources for building explainable models, and the limitations of semantically-blind evaluation metrics. To address these challenges, we present MedPath, a large-scale and multi-domain biomedical EL dataset that builds upon nine existing expert-annotated EL datasets. In MedPath, all entities are 1) normalized using the latest version of the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), 2) augmented with mappings to 62 other biomedical vocabularies and, crucially, 3) enriched with full ontological paths—i.e., from general to specific—in up to 11 biomedical vocabularies. MedPath directly enables new research frontiers in biomedical NLP, facilitating training and evaluation of semantic-rich and interpretable EL systems, and the development of the next generation of interoperable and explainable clinical NLP models.
Anthology ID:
2025.ijcnlp-long.158
Volume:
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2025
Address:
Mumbai, India
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Sakriani Sakti, Haofen Wang, Derek F. Wong, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Biplab Banerjee, Asif Ekbal, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Dhirendra Pratap Singh
Venues:
IJCNLP | AACL
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Publisher:
The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2959–2978
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-long.158/
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Cite (ACL):
Nishant Mishra, Wilker Aziz, and Iacer Calixto. 2025. MedPath: Multi-Domain Cross-Vocabulary Hierarchical Paths for Biomedical Entity Linking. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 2959–2978, Mumbai, India. The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MedPath: Multi-Domain Cross-Vocabulary Hierarchical Paths for Biomedical Entity Linking (Mishra et al., IJCNLP-AACL 2025)
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