LLM as Entity Disambiguator for Biomedical Entity-Linking

Christophe Ye, Cassie S. Mitchell


Abstract
Entity linking involves normalizing a mention in medical text to a unique identifier in a knowledge base, such as UMLS or MeSH. Most entity linkers follow a two-stage process: first, a candidate generation step selects high-quality candidates, and then a named entity disambiguation phase determines the best candidate for final linking. This study demonstrates that leveraging a large language model (LLM) as an entity disambiguator significantly enhances entity linking models’ accuracy and recall. Specifically, the LLM disambiguator achieves remarkable improvements when applied to alias-matching entity linking methods. Without any fine-tuning, our approach establishes a new state-of-the-art (SOTA), surpassing previous methods on multiple prevalent biomedical datasets by up to 16 points in accuracy. We released our code on GitHub at https://github.com/ChristopheYe/llm_disambiguator
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-short.25
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
301–312
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.acl-short.25/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Christophe Ye and Cassie S. Mitchell. 2025. LLM as Entity Disambiguator for Biomedical Entity-Linking. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 301–312, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LLM as Entity Disambiguator for Biomedical Entity-Linking (Ye & Mitchell, ACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.acl-short.25.pdf