IdioLink: Retrieving Meaning Beyond Words Across Idiomatic and Literal Expressions

Idioms pose a fundamental challenge for language models, as their meaning cannot be inferred from surface form alone. Understanding such expressions, therefore, requires semantic abstraction beyond lexical overlap. We introduce IdioLink, a retrieval benchmark designed to test whether models can link idiomatic expressions to conceptually equivalent meanings expressed in literal or paraphrased forms. IdioLink comprises 10,700 documents and 2,140 queries, spanning 107 idioms with both literal and figurative uses. Each document and query is annotated with spans that convey the core meaning. Evaluating strong embedding baselines (e.g., BGE, E5, Contriever, and Qwen), we show that current models struggle to retrieve equivalent meanings across divergent surface realizations, relying instead on topical and shallow semantic cues. IdioLink exposes key gaps in idiom-aware semantic retrieval and provides a challenging testbed for future models.

Building Patient Journeys in Hebrew: A Language Model for Clinical Timeline Extraction

We present a new Hebrew medical language model designed to extract structured clinical timelines from electronic health records, enabling the construction of patient journeys. Our model is based on DictaBERT 2.0 and continually pre-trained on over five million de-identified hospital records. To evaluate its effectiveness, we introduce two new datasets -- one from internal medicine and emergency departments, and another from oncology -- annotated for event temporal relations. Our results show that our model achieves strong performance on both datasets. We also find that vocabulary adaptation improves token efficiency and that de-identification does not compromise downstream performance, supporting privacy-conscious model development. The model is made available for research use under ethical restrictions.