Abstract Named Entity Recognition (NER) in specialized domains like biomedicine suffers from acute data scarcity, requiring expensive expert annotations. While data augmentation offers a promising solution, it inevitably introduces noisy and mislabeled samples that can degrade model performance. This problem is amplified in few-shot scenarios where every training example matters. We introduce PALAUNER (Policy-based Active Learning to Augment Named Entity Recognition), a reinforcement learning framework that learns to select high-quality samples from augmented data pools. Using a deep Q-network, our agent evaluates samples based on content features and model predictions, deciding which examples will improve NER performance. Experiments across five BioNER benchmarks demonstrate that PALAUNER consistently enhances diverse augmentation methods, from simple perturbations to GPT-based generation. Average F1 improvements are of 0.5−7.1 points in few-shot settings. PALAUNER’s modular design enables seamless integration with emerging augmentation techniques, providing a generalizable solution for training data quality enhancement. We publicly release our code on GitHub: ( https://github.com/picuslab/palauner ).

Misinformation in healthcare, from vaccine hesitancy to unproven treatments, poses risks to public health and trust in medical systems. While machine learning and natural language processing have advanced automated fact-checking, validating biomedical claims remains uniquely challenging due to complex terminology, the need for domain expertise, and the critical importance of grounding in scientific evidence. We introduce CER (Combining Evidence and Reasoning), a novel framework for biomedical fact-checking that integrates scientific evidence retrieval, reasoning via large language models, and supervised veracity prediction. By integrating the text-generation capabilities of large language models with advanced retrieval techniques for high-quality biomedical scientific evidence, CER effectively mitigates the risk of hallucinations, ensuring that generated outputs are grounded in verifiable, evidence-based sources. Evaluations on expert-annotated datasets (HealthFC, BioASQ-7b, SciFact) demonstrate state-of-the-art performance and promising cross-dataset generalization. Code and data are released for transparency and reproducibility: https://github.com/PRAISELab-PicusLab/CER

Biomedical misinformation - ranging from misleading social media posts to fake news articles and deepfake videos - is increasingly pervasive across digital platforms, posing significant risks to public health and clinical decision-making. We developed CER, a comprehensive fact-checking system designed specifically for biomedical content. CER integrates specialized components for claim detection, scientific evidence retrieval, and veracity assessment, leveraging both transformer models and large language models to process textual and multimedia content. Unlike existing fact-checking systems that focus solely on structured text, CER can analyze claims from diverse sources including videos and web content through automatic transcription and text extraction. The system interfaces with PubMed for evidence retrieval, employing both sparse and dense retrieval methods to gather relevant scientific literature. Our evaluations on standard benchmarks including HealthFC, BioASQ-7, and SciFact demonstrate that CER achieves state-of-the-art performance, with F1-score improvements compared to existing approaches. To ensure reproducibility and transparency, we release the GitHub repository with the source code, within which you can reach an interactive demonstration of the system published on HuggingFace and a video demonstration of the system \https://github.com/PRAISELab-PicusLab/CER-Fact-Checking.

Geopolitical news provides vast amounts of information essential for understanding international relations and political events. However, organizing this information into a coherent, structured format poses challenges due to the complexity and dynamic nature of the domain. This paper introduces a scalable system leveraging Large Language Models to build continuously updated Knowledge Graphs from Italian geopolitical news. The system features a modular architecture, including a Collector Node for scalable article extraction, a Redis-based reliable queue to manage large-scale data ingestion, and a Named Entity Recognition/Relation Extraction Engine to standardize entity-relation triples. The framework addresses key challenges, such as continuous updating and hallucination mitigation, ensuring the reliability of the graph. Our evaluations demonstrate significant improvements in scalability, uniformity of extracted triples, and graph accuracy, making this architecture particularly suitable for real-time geopolitical analysis.

Legal Artificial Intelligence has emerged as an essential field, focusing on AI technologies that facilitate various legal tasks and alleviate the workload of legal professionals. Despite advancements in Legal Artificial Intelligence, there remains a critical gap in systems that can provide both comprehensive and contextually accurate retrieval tailored to the intricate structure of EU legislation. We propose EuropeanLawAdvisor, an efficient and user-friendly legal information retrieval system designed to deliver tailored responses to legal queries. This system utilizes open-source Large Language Models within a Retrieval-Augmented Generation framework, facilitating precise and relevant information retrieval. The system employs a robust retrieval approach that integrates multi-match, k-nearest neighbors, hybrid methods, and TF-IDF search strategies across both complete documents and segmented text indexes, ensuring comprehensive retrieval for diverse query types. The implementation of the framework has demonstrated significant improvements in the accuracy and relevance of responses to EU legal queries, enhancing both the retrieval of relevant legal documents and the generation of precise responses. We show that EuropeanLawAdvisor, leveraging open-source models like Phi3-mini-3B and LLaMa-3-8B, achieves competitive Faithfulness and Relevance compared to GPT-4-Turbo. The performance gap narrows significantly in zero-shot scenarios, and our approach outperforms GPT-4-Turbo in the percentage of answered questions. We publicly release our code on GitHub: https://github.com/raffaele-russo/EuropeanLawAdvisor.

Deep learning, owing to its transformative influence across a myriad of sectors, has recently made its foray into the legal domain, instigated by the surge in digitization. Among the multitude of applications in this space, legal document classification emerges as a pivotal yet complex undertaking. Legal texts, characterized by unique domain-centric semantics and intricate linguistic patterns, necessitate precision-driven classification systems for numerous practical implications. This paper illuminates the challenges and opportunities in automating the classification of European Union (EU) legal documents, emphasizing the interrelationships among statutes and the hierarchical nature of legal references. In this context, we introduce a novel graph data modeling technique that adeptly marries content-centric indicators with the relational dynamics inherent among diverse legal documents. Central to our approach is a framework that melds text embeddings with graph neural networks for the classification of legal documents aligned with their subject-based directories. Empirical evaluations on the EU law dataset underline the efficacy of our model across varying granularities, from general thematic categories to intricate subtopics. This endeavor not only augments the comprehensibility and accessibility of EU jurisprudence but also holds significant implications across regulatory compliance, legal research, and policy formulation, underscoring the potential of deep learning in reshaping legal paradigms.

Recent years have seen an exponential growth (+98% in 2022 w.r.t. the previous year) of the number of research articles in the few-shot learning field, which aims at training machine learning models with extremely limited available data. The research interest toward few-shot learning systems for Named Entity Recognition (NER) is thus at the same time increasing. NER consists in identifying mentions of pre-defined entities from unstructured text, and serves as a fundamental step in many downstream tasks, such as the construction of Knowledge Graphs, or Question Answering. The need for a NER system able to be trained with few-annotated examples comes in all its urgency in domains where the annotation process requires time, knowledge and expertise (e.g., healthcare, finance, legal), and in low-resource languages. In this survey, starting from a clear definition and description of the few-shot NER (FS-NER) problem, we take stock of the current state-of-the-art and propose a taxonomy which divides algorithms in two macro-categories according to the underlying mechanisms: model-centric and data-centric. For each category, we line-up works as a story to show how the field is moving toward new research directions. Eventually, techniques, limitations, and key aspects are deeply analyzed to facilitate future studies.