PONE-D-25-12318Bangla MedER: Multi-BERT Ensemble Approach for the Recognition of Bangla Medical EntityPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Aurpa,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

As you can see the reviewers and the editor are suggesting a revise due to aspects related to related work, comparison and PLOS ONE's compliance on data and code.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Issa Atoum

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Additional Editor Comments:

Kindly include these in your revised manuscript.

Include quantitative impact in both the abstract and conclusion, and add a subsection addressing limitations, challenges, and contributions. Summarize the literature review in a comparative table, provide more details on datasets and experimental setup, and increase the number of references to strengthen the scholarly foundation. Clearly indicate how data were extracted, ensure compliance with PLOS ONE’s code and dataset availability requirements. Despite the inclusion of Section 7 on ethical statements, further enhancements are required for PLOS ONE compliance include clear statement on ethical considerations related to data collection and usage.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: This paper proposes a novel MultiBERT Ensemble approach for MedER in Bangla text. this method utilizes an ensemble of multi-layer BERT models to recognize medical entities in Bangla medical text, offering a unique contribution to the field. The proposed model outperforms existing transformer-based models, achieving an 11.80% accuracy improvement over a singlelayer BERT model. for low-resource languages and lacking of annotated datasets a high-quality dataset tailored for the Bangla MedER task is developed. The dataset was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the model through multiple performance metrics, demonstrating its robustness and applicability. The findings highlight the potential of Multi-BERT Ensemble models in improving MedER for Bangla and set the foundation for further advancements in low-resource medical NLP..

Good work keep up

But some comments is needed and submitted to he editor

Reviewer #2: 1- The introduction is very simple and needs further expansion to clarify the research gap and what researchers in this field are seeking.

2- Sort research papers in Related Work by year of publication (from oldest to newest) and add research papers published in 2025. It is also preferable to add a table summarizing the pros and cons of each included research paper.

3- Comparison of the submitted work with other research papers published in the years 2023-2025

4- Adding recent references published in 2025, with no less than three references

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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PONE-D-25-12318R1Bangla MedER: Multi-BERT Ensemble Approach for the Recognition of Bangla Medical EntityPLOS One

Dear Dr. Akter,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

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Upon internal review, we require the following revisions to align the manuscript with PLOS ONE’s Data Availability Policy. Please address these points to ensure the transparency and reproducibility of your findings:

Code Sharing & Reproducibility: In accordance with our reproducibility guidelines, please provide the specific source code or scripts used to generate the results presented in Table 5 and Figures 6 and 7. We recommend depositing this code in a public repository (e.g., GitHub, Zenodo, or Figshare) and providing the DOI or link within your Data Availability Statement.

Data Alignment: There appear to be discrepancies between the figures and their corresponding tables. Please ensure that all data points are fully synchronized across Table 5, Figure 6, and Figure 7.

Comprehensive Metrics: The current manuscript does not provide a complete set of class label metrics for the top-performing model. Please update the results section to include a granular breakdown (e.g., precision, recall, and F1-score for each class) to allow for a thorough validation of the model's performance.

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Please submit your revised manuscript by Feb 26 2026 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Issa Atoum

Academic Editor

PLOS One

Journal Requirements:

1. If the reviewer comments include a recommendation to cite specific previously published works, please review and evaluate these publications to determine whether they are relevant and should be cited. There is no requirement to cite these works unless the editor has indicated otherwise.

2. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #2: No

**********

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

To ensure your figures meet our technical requirements, please review our figure guidelines: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/figures

You may also use PLOS’s free figure tool, NAAS, to help you prepare publication quality figures: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/figures#loc-tools-for-figure-preparation.

NAAS will assess whether your figures meet our technical requirements by comparing each figure against our figure specifications.

Bangla MedER: Multi-BERT Ensemble Approach for the Recognition of Bangla Medical Entity

PONE-D-25-12318R2

Dear Dr. Akter,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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Kind regards,

Issa Atoum

Academic Editor

PLOS One

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments: