Analysing Lightweight Large Language Models for Biomedical Named Entity Recognition on Diverse Ouput Formats

Pierre Epron, Adrien Coulet, Mehwish Alam


Abstract
Despite their strong linguistic capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) are computationally demanding and require substantial resources for fine-tuning, which is unadapted to privacy and budget constraints of many healthcare settings. To address this, we present an experimental analysis focused on Biomedical Named Entity Recognition using lightweight LLMs, we evaluate the impact of different output formats on model performance. The results reveal that lightweight LLMs can achieve competitive performance compared to the larger models, highlighting their potential as lightweight yet effective alternatives for biomedical information extraction. Our analysis shows that instruction tuning over many distinct formats does not improve performance, but identifies several format consistently associated with better performance.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-main.193
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
2458–2470
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.193/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pierre Epron, Adrien Coulet, and Mehwish Alam. 2026. Analysing Lightweight Large Language Models for Biomedical Named Entity Recognition on Diverse Ouput Formats. International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, main:2458–2470.
Cite (Informal):
Analysing Lightweight Large Language Models for Biomedical Named Entity Recognition on Diverse Ouput Formats (Epron et al., LREC 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.193.pdf