@inproceedings{lin-etal-2026-divide,
title = "Divide-Prompt-Refine: a Training-Free, Structure-Aware Framework for Biomedical Abstract Generation",
author = "Lin, Sylvey and
Menke, Joseph and
Ming, Shufan and
Nam, Dongin and
Smalheiser, Neil and
Kilicoglu, Halil",
editor = "Demner-Fushman, Dina and
Ananiadou, Sophia and
Roberts, Kirk and
Tsujii, Junichi",
booktitle = "{B}io{NLP} 2026",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.bionlp-1.64/",
pages = "770--790",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-434-7",
abstract = "Biomedical abstracts play a critical role in downstream NLP applications, such as information retrieval, biocuration, and biomedical knowledge discovery. However, a non-trivial number of biomedical articles do not have abstracts, diminishing the utility of these articles for downstream tasks. We propose DPR-BAG (Divide, Prompt, and Refine for Biomedical Abstract Generation), a training-free, zero-shot framework that generates coherent and factually grounded abstracts for biomedical articles with full text but no abstract. DPR-BAG decomposes full-text documents into structured rhetorical facets following the Background-Objective-Methods-Results-Conclusions (BOMRC) schema, performs parallel LLM-based summarization for each facet, and applies a final refinement stage to restore global discourse coherence. On PMC-MAD, a distribution-aligned dataset of 46,309 biomedical articles, DPR-BAG improves abstractive novelty over strong extractive and fine-tuned baselines, while maintaining factual consistency. Our ablation study reveals a counterintuitive finding: increasing prompt complexity or explicitly injecting entity-level guidance can degrade factual alignment, highlighting the importance of controlled prompting strategies. These findings underscore the potential of training-free, structure-aware frameworks for scalable biomedical abstract generation in low-resource settings. Our data and code are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/pmc-mad/PMC-MAD and https://github.com/ScienceNLP-Lab/MultiTagger-v2/tree/main/DPR-BAG."
}<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="lin-etal-2026-divide">
<titleInfo>
<title>Divide-Prompt-Refine: a Training-Free, Structure-Aware Framework for Biomedical Abstract Generation</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Sylvey</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Lin</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Joseph</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Menke</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Shufan</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Ming</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Dongin</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Nam</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Neil</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Smalheiser</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Halil</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Kilicoglu</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<dateIssued>2026-07</dateIssued>
</originInfo>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
<relatedItem type="host">
<titleInfo>
<title>BioNLP 2026</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Dina</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Demner-Fushman</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Sophia</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Ananiadou</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Kirk</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Roberts</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Junichi</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Tsujii</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
<place>
<placeTerm type="text">San Diego, California</placeTerm>
</place>
</originInfo>
<genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
<identifier type="isbn">979-8-89176-434-7</identifier>
</relatedItem>
<abstract>Biomedical abstracts play a critical role in downstream NLP applications, such as information retrieval, biocuration, and biomedical knowledge discovery. However, a non-trivial number of biomedical articles do not have abstracts, diminishing the utility of these articles for downstream tasks. We propose DPR-BAG (Divide, Prompt, and Refine for Biomedical Abstract Generation), a training-free, zero-shot framework that generates coherent and factually grounded abstracts for biomedical articles with full text but no abstract. DPR-BAG decomposes full-text documents into structured rhetorical facets following the Background-Objective-Methods-Results-Conclusions (BOMRC) schema, performs parallel LLM-based summarization for each facet, and applies a final refinement stage to restore global discourse coherence. On PMC-MAD, a distribution-aligned dataset of 46,309 biomedical articles, DPR-BAG improves abstractive novelty over strong extractive and fine-tuned baselines, while maintaining factual consistency. Our ablation study reveals a counterintuitive finding: increasing prompt complexity or explicitly injecting entity-level guidance can degrade factual alignment, highlighting the importance of controlled prompting strategies. These findings underscore the potential of training-free, structure-aware frameworks for scalable biomedical abstract generation in low-resource settings. Our data and code are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/pmc-mad/PMC-MAD and https://github.com/ScienceNLP-Lab/MultiTagger-v2/tree/main/DPR-BAG.</abstract>
<identifier type="citekey">lin-etal-2026-divide</identifier>
<location>
<url>https://aclanthology.org/2026.bionlp-1.64/</url>
</location>
<part>
<date>2026-07</date>
<extent unit="page">
<start>770</start>
<end>790</end>
</extent>
</part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>
%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Divide-Prompt-Refine: a Training-Free, Structure-Aware Framework for Biomedical Abstract Generation
%A Lin, Sylvey
%A Menke, Joseph
%A Ming, Shufan
%A Nam, Dongin
%A Smalheiser, Neil
%A Kilicoglu, Halil
%Y Demner-Fushman, Dina
%Y Ananiadou, Sophia
%Y Roberts, Kirk
%Y Tsujii, Junichi
%S BioNLP 2026
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California
%@ 979-8-89176-434-7
%F lin-etal-2026-divide
%X Biomedical abstracts play a critical role in downstream NLP applications, such as information retrieval, biocuration, and biomedical knowledge discovery. However, a non-trivial number of biomedical articles do not have abstracts, diminishing the utility of these articles for downstream tasks. We propose DPR-BAG (Divide, Prompt, and Refine for Biomedical Abstract Generation), a training-free, zero-shot framework that generates coherent and factually grounded abstracts for biomedical articles with full text but no abstract. DPR-BAG decomposes full-text documents into structured rhetorical facets following the Background-Objective-Methods-Results-Conclusions (BOMRC) schema, performs parallel LLM-based summarization for each facet, and applies a final refinement stage to restore global discourse coherence. On PMC-MAD, a distribution-aligned dataset of 46,309 biomedical articles, DPR-BAG improves abstractive novelty over strong extractive and fine-tuned baselines, while maintaining factual consistency. Our ablation study reveals a counterintuitive finding: increasing prompt complexity or explicitly injecting entity-level guidance can degrade factual alignment, highlighting the importance of controlled prompting strategies. These findings underscore the potential of training-free, structure-aware frameworks for scalable biomedical abstract generation in low-resource settings. Our data and code are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/pmc-mad/PMC-MAD and https://github.com/ScienceNLP-Lab/MultiTagger-v2/tree/main/DPR-BAG.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.bionlp-1.64/
%P 770-790
Markdown (Informal)
[Divide-Prompt-Refine: a Training-Free, Structure-Aware Framework for Biomedical Abstract Generation](https://aclanthology.org/2026.bionlp-1.64/) (Lin et al., BioNLP 2026)
ACL