RainCityNLP at BioLaySumm2025: Extract then Summarize at Home

AbstractAs part of the BioLaySumm shared task at ACL 2025, we developed a summarization tool designed to translate complex biomedical texts into layperson-friendly summaries. Our goal was to enhance accessibility and comprehension for patients and others without specialized medical knowledge. The system employed an extractive-then-abstractive summarization pipeline. For the abstractive component, we experimented with two models: Pegasus-XSum and a Falcons.ai model pre-trained on medical data. Final outputs were evaluated using the official BioLaySumm 2025 metrics. To promote practical accessibility, we completed all experimentation on consumer-grade hardware, demonstrating the feasibility of our approach in low-resource settings.