A pretrained biomedical large language model for Persian biomedical text mining

Large language models (LLMs) have recently gained attention in the life sciences due to their capacity to model, extract, and apply complex biological information. Beyond their classical use as chatbots, these systems are increasingly used for complex analysis and problem-solving in specialized fields, including bioinformatics. First, we introduce BIOPARS-BENCH, a dataset from over 10,000 scientific articles, textbooks, and medical websites. BioParsQA was also introduced to evaluate the proposed model, which consists of 5231 Persian medical questions and answers. This study then introduces BioPars, a simple but accurate measure designed to assess LLMs for three main abilities: acquiring subject-specific knowledge, interpreting and synthesizing such knowledge, and demonstrating proper evidence. Comparing ChatGPT, Llama, and Galactica, our study highlights their ability to remember and retrieve learned knowledge but also reveals shortcomings in addressing higher-level, real-world questions and fine-grained inferences. These findings indicate the need for further fine-tuning to address the capabilities of LLM in bioinformatics tasks. To our knowledge, BioPars is the first application of LLM in Persian medical QA, especially for generating long answers. Evaluation of four selected medical QA datasets shows that BioPars has achieved remarkable results compared to comparative approaches. The model on BioParsQA achieved a ROUGE-L score of 29.99, which is an improvement over GPT-4 1.0. The model achieved a BERTScore of 90.87 with the MMR method. The MoverScore and BLEURT values were also higher in this model than the other three models. In addition, the reported scores for the model are MoverScore = 60.43 and BLEURT = 50.78.