Information Extraction (IE), encompassing Named Entity Recognition (NER), Named Entity Linking (NEL), and Relation Extraction (RE), is critical for transforming the rapidly growing volume of scientific publications into structured, actionable knowledge. This need is especially evident in fast-evolving biomedical fields such as the gut-brain axis, where research investigates complex interactions between the gut microbiota and brain-related disorders. Existing biomedical IE benchmarks, however, are often narrow in scope and rely heavily on distantly supervised or automatically generated annotations, limiting their utility for advancing robust IE methods. We introduce GutBrainIE, a benchmark based on more than 1,600 PubMed abstracts, manually annotated by biomedical and terminological experts with fine-grained entities, concept-level links, and relations. While grounded in the gut-brain axis, the benchmark’s rich schema, multiple tasks, and combination of highly curated and weakly supervised data make it broadly applicable to the development and evaluation of biomedical IE systems across domains.

Understanding specialized biomedical knowledge can be particularly challenging, posing significant barriers to the acquisition and use of medical information especially by patients. In this study, a methodology for drafting patient-centered explanations of concepts related to the gut-brain axis and related medical conditions is proposed. The explanations are specifically intended for patients affected by neurodegenerative diseases, who are experiencing cognitive decline. The methodology consists of the following steps: 1) the drafting of specialized definitions in the form of intensional definitions, which enable the structured representation of domain-specific knowledge, and 2) the simplification of specialized definitions into patient-centered explanations. In particular, explanations intended for patients are formulated using popular terms and plain language, considered as two complementary strategies aimed at enhancing the comprehension of specialized biomedical knowledge. This work lays the foundation for the future development of a terminology resource specifically designed to collect and systematically represent knowledge related to the gut-brain axis and associated health conditions.

We present the results of the ninth edition of the Biomedical Translation Task at WMT’24. We released test sets for six language pairs, namely, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish, from and into English. Eachtest set consists of 50 abstracts from PubMed. Differently from previous years, we did not split abstracts into sentences. We received submissions from five teams, and for almost all language directions. We used a baseline/comparison system based on Llama 3.1 and share the source code at https://github.com/cgrozea/wmt24biomed-ref.