RainCityNLP at BioLaySumm2025: Extract then Summarize at Home

As 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.aimodel 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.