We introduce the first dataset that jointly covers both lexical complexity prediction (LCP) annotations and lexical simplification (LS) for Romanian, along with a comparison of lexical simplification approaches.We propose a methodology for ordering simplification suggestions using a pairwise ranking approximation method, arranging candidates from simple to complex based on a separate set of human judgments.In addition, we provide human lexical complexity annotations for 3,921 word samples in context.Finally, we explore several novel pipelines for complexity prediction and simplification and present the first text simplification system for Romanian.

Extracting SNP-phenotype associations from biomedical literature is vital but challenging. We benchmarked diverse NLP models, including MLMs, hybrid architectures, and state-of-the-art LLMs (Gemini 2.0, OpenAI O-series, Qwen, Mistral), on the SNPPhenA corpus across three tasks: sentence-level, abstract-level, and association strength classification. OpenAI O1 achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) results using few-shot learning for non-finetuned sentence-level classification (F1 0.89) and established a new SOTA for abstract-level classification (F1 0.82). Association strength classification proved difficult, though fine-tuned Gemini 2.0 Pro performed best (F1 0.60) in the first LLM evaluation of this task. Proprietary LLMs, especially in few-shot (O1) or fine-tuned (Gemini 2.0 Pro) settings, significantly outperformed other models. These findings confrm the power of modern LLMs for genomic knowledge extraction.

Next-Generation Sequencing has revolutionized the study of genetic mutations, enabling large-scale investigations into their roles in disease development. However, extracting meaningful insights from the vast amount of biomedical literature remains a complex challenge that cannot be addressed manually. In this paper, we present pre-trained models (PTMs) for the automatic extraction of relations from biomedical text, specifically targeting the variant-phenotype domain. Our evaluation on the SNPPhenA corpus demonstrates that fine-tuning small BERT-based models, particularly DeBERTa, yields strong performance, approaching the current state-of-the-art (SOTA). Additionally, our results indicate that carefully fine-tuning Google’s Gemini Pro 1.0 outperforms the existing SOTA for both sentence-level tasks (where the model processes only the target sentence) and abstract-level tasks (where the model processes the entire abstract).