DocTalkBN is a large-scale multimodal dataset of authentic expert telemedicine conversations in Bengali, comprising 557.63 hours of paired audio and text, 1,515 multi-turn patient calls, and 10,274 host–doctor question–answer exchanges across 26 medical specialties. The dataset contains 1.7 million tokens and preserves the spontaneity and contextual richness of real medical interactions in a low-resource language. Three downstream tasks—medical triage classification, advice safety evaluation, and medical named entity recognition—are constructed to benchmark large language models and encoder-based baselines, demonstrating DocTalkBN’s practical usefulness for clinically grounded reasoning.
By Anik Saha, Fahmida Sultana Naznin, Sadatul Islam Sadi, Ananya Shahrin Promi, Wahid Al Azad Navid, Rifat Shahriyar
arXiv:2609.39975v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: This paper presents an overview of the fourteenth edition of the BioASQ challenge, organized in the context of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluat...
By Anastasios Nentidis, Georgios Katsimpras, Anastasia Krithara, Martin Krallinger, Miguel Rodr\'iguez-Ortega, Eduard Rodriguez-L\'opez, Natalia Loukachevitch, Igor Rozhkov, Elena Tutubalina, Dimitris Dimitriadis, Vasiliki Patsiou, Grigorios Tsoumakas, George Giannakoulas, Alexandra Bekiaridou, Athanasios Samaras, Giorgio Maria Di Nunzio, Nicola Ferro, Stefano Marchesin, Marco Martinelli, Gianmaria Silvello, Georgios Paliouras
The paper introduces a Nepali Question‑Answer dataset focused on passport‑related FAQs to support information retrieval in a low‑resource language. The authors fine‑tune transformer‑based embedding models for semantic similarity and compare them against the BM25 baseline. Their experiments show that fine‑tuned SBERT models outperform BM25, while multilingual E5 embeddings achieve the best overall retrieval performance.
By Funghang Limbu Begha, Praveen Acharya, Bal Krishna Bal
IndoNutriQA is a newly released Indonesian clinical nutrition question‑answer benchmark comprising 911 expert‑curated question‑answer pairs drawn from real clinical‑nutrition reports. Each pair is grounded in a clinically relevant context and enriched with structured metadata such as anthropometric assessment, medical diagnosis, and document provenance. The dataset supports generative, extractive, and retrieval‑augmented QA, and includes fine‑tuned baselines and zero‑shot evaluations of contemporary large language models.
By Tirana Noor Fatyanosa, Ummu Ditya Erliana, Mahendra Data, Muhammad Nurwegiono, Eleazar Tadeo Eman, Alham Fikri Aji
IndoNutriQA is a curated benchmark of 911 Indonesian clinical nutrition question‑answer pairs derived from real reports. Each pair includes a clinically relevant context, structured metadata, and answers in free‑form prose, with expert validation indicating 6‑10% of answers are contestable. The dataset supports generative, extractive, and retrieval‑augmented QA, and is used to evaluate fine‑tuned models and large language models in zero‑ and few‑shot settings.
This thesis explores how to select and adapt NLP models for global health literature when annotated data and computational resources are scarce. It compares skip‑gram word2vec models trained on increasingly large specialized corpora with BioWordVec for semantic tag discovery, finding that larger coverage does not always yield more useful domain associations. The study also evaluates convolutional spaCy models versus a RoBERTa transformer for named entity recognition, noting a trade‑off between higher F1 scores and longer inference time, and investigates MiniLM few‑shot versus BART‑MNLI zero‑shot classification for multi‑label topic classification, highlighting practical constraints of inference cost.
"whyItMatters":"The work provides empirical guidance on balancing model accuracy and resource demands for building knowledge systems in low‑resource global health settings."
By Genis Skura, Antoine Geissb\"uhler, Jean-Luc Falcone
The paper introduces a method for generating multilingual reasoning traces for medical question answering using large language models. It creates 500,000 reasoning traces in English, Italian, and Spanish by retrieving medical information from Wikipedia and applies them to MedQA and MedMCQA datasets extended into Italian and Spanish. The approach improves performance in both few‑shot in‑context learning and supervised fine‑tuning, achieving state‑of‑the‑art results for 8B‑parameter LLMs and releasing all resources for further research.
By Pietro Ferrazzi, Aitor Soroa, Rodrigo Agerri
BioMol-MQA is a new question‑answering dataset focused on polypharmacy that combines a multimodal knowledge graph—containing both text and molecular structure—with challenging questions designed to test large language models’ ability to retrieve and reason over this diverse information. The dataset highlights the limitations of current retrieval‑augmented generation systems, which typically handle only single‑modality text, by demonstrating that existing LLMs perform poorly unless provided with the necessary multimodal background data. This underscores the need for more robust RAG frameworks capable of integrating multiple data types for accurate responses.
By Saptarshi Sengupta, Shuhua Yang, Paul Kwong Yu, Fali Wang, Suhang Wang
arXiv:2604. 25605v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Introduction: Semantic search, which retrieves documents based on conceptual similarity rather than keywords, offers advantages for retrieval of clinical information.
By Faith Wavinya Mutinda, Spandana Makeneni, Anna Lin, Shivaji Dutta, Irit R. Rasooly, Patrick Dibussolo, Shivani Kamath Belman, Hessam Shahriari, Kevin Murphy, Alex B. Ruan, Barbara H. Chaiyachati, Sanjay Chainani, Robert W. Grundmeier, Scott M. Haag, Jeffrey M. Miller, Heather M. Griffis, Ian M. Campbell
arXiv:2607. 06641v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) achieve promising results on medical question answering benchmarks, yet their use in public health is constrained by hallucinations and the rapid evolution of official guidance.
By Felix Feldman, Joshua Harris, Timothy Laurence, Leo Loman, Ollie Higgins, Fan Grayson, Poonam Soma, Bethany Pace-Bonello, Michael Borowitz, Toby Nonnenmacher
This study benchmarks transformer models for Bangla medical named entity recognition (NER), comparing BanglaBERT, multilingual BERT (mBERT), XLM‑RoBERTa, and GPT‑4o mini under zero‑shot and few‑shot prompting. Across a full test set of 3,179 samples, fine‑tuned XLM‑RoBERTa achieves a new state‑of‑the‑art F1‑score of 0.5959, while BanglaBERT lags with 0.4937, suggesting that domain diversity outweighs language specificity. The analysis shows high performance on Medicine and Specialist entities (F1 > 0.83) but lower accuracy on Symptoms (F1 0.4367), and demonstrates that fine‑tuned transformers outperform prompt‑only approaches by a factor of 3.76.
By Rakib Abdullah, Md. Maruful Islam Maruf
arXiv:2410. 15051v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Identifying patient diagnoses from hospital discharge letters is essential for large-scale cohort selection and epidemiological research, but traditional supervised approaches require extensive manual annotation, which is often impractical for large textual datasets.
By Vittorio Torri, Elisa Barbieri, Anna Cantarutti, Carlo Giaquinto, Francesca Ieva