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The authors introduce PlantDeBERTa, a DeBERTa-based language model fine-tuned on a corpus of plant stress-response abstracts, specifically focusing on lentil responses to abiotic and biotic stressors. They combine transformer-based modeling with rule-enhanced linguistic post-processing and ontology-grounded entity normalization to improve the model's ability to capture biologically meaningful relationships. PlantDeBERTa demonstrates strong generalization capabilities across entity types, highlighting the potential for domain adaptation in plant science.
A DeBERTa model fine-tuned on plant science literature achieves strong generalization in low-resource entity recognition, opening up new possibilities for data-driven discovery in plant genomics and agronomy.
The rapid advancement of transformer-based language models has catalyzed breakthroughs in biomedical and clinical natural language processing; however, plant science remains markedly underserved by such domain-adapted tools. In this work, we present PlantDeBERTa, a high-performance, open-source language model specifically tailored for extracting structured knowledge from plant stress-response literature. Built upon the DeBERTa architecture-known for its disentangled attention and robust contextual encoding-PlantDeBERTa is fine-tuned on a meticulously curated corpus of expert-annotated abstracts, with a primary focus on lentil (Lens culinaris) responses to diverse abiotic and biotic stressors. Our methodology combines transformer-based modeling with rule-enhanced linguistic post-processing and ontology-grounded entity normalization, enabling PlantDeBERTa to capture biologically meaningful relationships with precision and semantic fidelity. The underlying corpus is annotated using a hierarchical schema aligned with the Crop Ontology, encompassing molecular, physiological, biochemical, and agronomic dimensions of plant adaptation. PlantDeBERTa exhibits strong generalization capabilities across entity types and demonstrates the feasibility of robust domain adaptation in low-resource scientific fields.By providing a scalable and reproducible framework for high-resolution entity recognition, PlantDeBERTa bridges a critical gap in agricultural NLP and paves the way for intelligent, data-driven systems in plant genomics, phenomics, and agronomic knowledge discovery. Our model is publicly released to promote transparency and accelerate cross-disciplinary innovation in computational plant science.
