arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 22

LLMs Anchor on Chief Complaint and Fail to Integrate Evidence in Sequential Clinical Triage

The study evaluates large language models (LLMs) on sequential emergency department triage, where acuity labels are predicted from progressively longer nurse‑patient conversations. Six LLMs were tested at five checkpoints on simulated and physician‑authored dialogues, showing a decline from moderate‑to‑substantial agreement on full records to only fair‑to‑moderate agreement at each checkpoint. The models consistently anchor on chief complaint exchanges and fail to integrate later evidence, yielding low agreement with clinicians (QWK 0.295 vs. 0.887‑0.929) and concentrating predictions on ESI‑2 and ESI‑3. whyItMatters":"The findings reveal that LLMs, despite strong offline performance, cannot reliably handle the sequential nature of real‑time triage, highlighting a critical gap for safe deployment in emergency settings."

By Dipankar Srirag, Haokai Zhao, Ashutosh Kumar, Eleanor Hopper, Michael Dalton, Quoc Dung Nguyen, Aditya Joshi, Salil S. Kanhere, Padmanesan Narasimhan
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 5

Understanding Clinical Cognitive Dialogues Using Large Language Models

The paper introduces a de‑identified corpus of 33 in‑person cognitive assessment conversations, comprising 8,250 utterances annotated for three speaker roles and 56 dialogue acts. The authors benchmark large language models on fine‑grained dialogue‑act classification and next‑patient‑utterance generation, finding that instruction tuning and reasoning‑aware fine‑tuning improve performance but that models still struggle with closely related dialogue acts. The corpus and benchmark are presented as tools to measure interaction structure in cognitive assessments and to support future research on conversational markers, clinician education, and validated simulated patients.

By Vishalakshi Arumugam, Dan Schumacher, Veronica Rammouz, Erfan Nourbakhsh, Enrique Gonzalez Guerrero, Jeremy Davis, Anthony Rios