CLSep 28, 2022Code
METS-CoV: A Dataset of Medical Entity and Targeted Sentiment on COVID-19 Related TweetsPeilin Zhou, Zeqiang Wang, Dading Chong et al. · bytedance, harvard
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to bring up various topics discussed or debated on social media. In order to explore the impact of pandemics on people's lives, it is crucial to understand the public's concerns and attitudes towards pandemic-related entities (e.g., drugs, vaccines) on social media. However, models trained on existing named entity recognition (NER) or targeted sentiment analysis (TSA) datasets have limited ability to understand COVID-19-related social media texts because these datasets are not designed or annotated from a medical perspective. This paper releases METS-CoV, a dataset containing medical entities and targeted sentiments from COVID-19-related tweets. METS-CoV contains 10,000 tweets with 7 types of entities, including 4 medical entity types (Disease, Drug, Symptom, and Vaccine) and 3 general entity types (Person, Location, and Organization). To further investigate tweet users' attitudes toward specific entities, 4 types of entities (Person, Organization, Drug, and Vaccine) are selected and annotated with user sentiments, resulting in a targeted sentiment dataset with 9,101 entities (in 5,278 tweets). To the best of our knowledge, METS-CoV is the first dataset to collect medical entities and corresponding sentiments of COVID-19-related tweets. We benchmark the performance of classical machine learning models and state-of-the-art deep learning models on NER and TSA tasks with extensive experiments. Results show that the dataset has vast room for improvement for both NER and TSA tasks. METS-CoV is an important resource for developing better medical social media tools and facilitating computational social science research, especially in epidemiology. Our data, annotation guidelines, benchmark models, and source code are publicly available (https://github.com/YLab-Open/METS-CoV) to ensure reproducibility.
CLNov 13, 2022Code
GreenPLM: Cross-Lingual Transfer of Monolingual Pre-Trained Language Models at Almost No CostQingcheng Zeng, Lucas Garay, Peilin Zhou et al. · cambridge, harvard
Large pre-trained models have revolutionized natural language processing (NLP) research and applications, but high training costs and limited data resources have prevented their benefits from being shared equally amongst speakers of all the world's languages. To address issues of cross-linguistic access to such models and reduce energy consumption for sustainability during large-scale model training, this study proposes an effective and energy-efficient framework called GreenPLM that uses bilingual lexicons to directly "translate" pre-trained language models of one language into another at almost no additional cost. We validate this approach in 18 languages' BERT models and show that this framework is comparable to, if not better than, other heuristics with high training costs. In addition, given lightweight continued pre-training on limited data where available, this framework outperforms the original monolingual language models in six out of seven tested languages with up to 200x less pre-training efforts. Aiming at the Leave No One Behind Principle (LNOB), our approach manages to reduce inequalities between languages and energy consumption greatly. We make our codes and models publicly available here: \url{https://github.com/qcznlp/GreenPLMs}
CLFeb 23, 2023
Exploring Social Media for Early Detection of Depression in COVID-19 PatientsJiageng Wu, Xian Wu, Yining Hua et al. · harvard
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused substantial damage to global health. Even though three years have passed, the world continues to struggle with the virus. Concerns are growing about the impact of COVID-19 on the mental health of infected individuals, who are more likely to experience depression, which can have long-lasting consequences for both the affected individuals and the world. Detection and intervention at an early stage can reduce the risk of depression in COVID-19 patients. In this paper, we investigated the relationship between COVID-19 infection and depression through social media analysis. Firstly, we managed a dataset of COVID-19 patients that contains information about their social media activity both before and after infection. Secondly,We conducted an extensive analysis of this dataset to investigate the characteristic of COVID-19 patients with a higher risk of depression. Thirdly, we proposed a deep neural network for early prediction of depression risk. This model considers daily mood swings as a psychiatric signal and incorporates textual and emotional characteristics via knowledge distillation. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed framework outperforms baselines in detecting depression risk, with an AUROC of 0.9317 and an AUPRC of 0.8116. Our model has the potential to enable public health organizations to initiate prompt intervention with high-risk patients
CLSep 28, 2022Code
YATO: Yet Another deep learning based Text analysis Open toolkitZeqiang Wang, Yile Wang, Jiageng Wu et al. · bytedance, harvard
We introduce YATO, an open-source, easy-to-use toolkit for text analysis with deep learning. Different from existing heavily engineered toolkits and platforms, YATO is lightweight and user-friendly for researchers from cross-disciplinary areas. Designed in a hierarchical structure, YATO supports free combinations of three types of widely used features including 1) traditional neural networks (CNN, RNN, etc.); 2) pre-trained language models (BERT, RoBERTa, ELECTRA, etc.); and 3) user-customized neural features via a simple configurable file. Benefiting from the advantages of flexibility and ease of use, YATO can facilitate fast reproduction and refinement of state-of-the-art NLP models, and promote the cross-disciplinary applications of NLP techniques. The code, examples, and documentation are publicly available at https://github.com/jiesutd/YATO. A demo video is also available at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJ0mhzMcRuDUlTkzBfAftOqiJRxYTTjXH.
CLJun 28, 2023
Streamlining Social Media Information Retrieval for COVID-19 Research with Deep LearningYining Hua, Jiageng Wu, Shixu Lin et al.
Objective: Social media-based public health research is crucial for epidemic surveillance, but most studies identify relevant corpora with keyword-matching. This study develops a system to streamline the process of curating colloquial medical dictionaries. We demonstrate the pipeline by curating a UMLS-colloquial symptom dictionary from COVID-19-related tweets as proof of concept. Methods: COVID-19-related tweets from February 1, 2020, to April 30, 2022 were used. The pipeline includes three modules: a named entity recognition module to detect symptoms in tweets; an entity normalization module to aggregate detected entities; and a mapping module that iteratively maps entities to Unified Medical Language System concepts. A random 500 entity sample were drawn from the final dictionary for accuracy validation. Additionally, we conducted a symptom frequency distribution analysis to compare our dictionary to a pre-defined lexicon from previous research. Results: We identified 498,480 unique symptom entity expressions from the tweets. Pre-processing reduces the number to 18,226. The final dictionary contains 38,175 unique expressions of symptoms that can be mapped to 966 UMLS concepts (accuracy = 95%). Symptom distribution analysis found that our dictionary detects more symptoms and is effective at identifying psychiatric disorders like anxiety and depression, often missed by pre-defined lexicons. Conclusions: This study advances public health research by implementing a novel, systematic pipeline for curating symptom lexicons from social media data. The final lexicon's high accuracy, validated by medical professionals, underscores the potential of this methodology to reliably interpret and categorize vast amounts of unstructured social media data into actionable medical insights across diverse linguistic and regional landscapes.
CLApr 28, 2025Code
BRIDGE: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Understanding Real-world Clinical Practice TextJiageng Wu, Bowen Gu, Ren Zhou et al. · harvard, mit
Large language models (LLMs) hold great promise for medical applications and are evolving rapidly, with new models being released at an accelerated pace. However, benchmarking on large-scale real-world data such as electronic health records (EHRs) is critical, as clinical decisions are directly informed by these sources, yet current evaluations remain limited. Most existing benchmarks rely on medical exam-style questions or PubMed-derived text, failing to capture the complexity of real-world clinical data. Others focus narrowly on specific application scenarios, limiting their generalizability across broader clinical use. To address this gap, we present BRIDGE, a comprehensive multilingual benchmark comprising 87 tasks sourced from real-world clinical data sources across nine languages. It covers eight major task types spanning the entire continuum of patient care across six clinical stages and 20 representative applications, including triage and referral, consultation, information extraction, diagnosis, prognosis, and billing coding, and involves 14 clinical specialties. We systematically evaluated 95 LLMs (including DeepSeek-R1, GPT-4o, Gemini series, and Qwen3 series) under various inference strategies. Our results reveal substantial performance variation across model sizes, languages, natural language processing tasks, and clinical specialties. Notably, we demonstrate that open-source LLMs can achieve performance comparable to proprietary models, while medically fine-tuned LLMs based on older architectures often underperform versus updated general-purpose models. The BRIDGE and its corresponding leaderboard serve as a foundational resource and a unique reference for the development and evaluation of new LLMs in real-world clinical text understanding. The BRIDGE leaderboard: https://huggingface.co/spaces/YLab-Open/BRIDGE-Medical-Leaderboard
AIMay 12
OptArgus: A Multi-Agent System to Detect Hallucinations in LLM-based Optimization ModelingZhong Li, Zihan Guo, Xiaohan Lu et al.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to translate natural-language optimization problems into mathematical formulations and solver code, but matching the reference objective value is not a reliable test of correctness: an artifact may agree numerically while still changing the underlying optimization semantics. We formulate this issue as \emph{optimization-modeling hallucination detection}, namely structural consistency auditing over the problem description, symbolic model, and solver implementation. We develop, to our knowledge, the first fine-grained hallucination taxonomy specifically for optimization modeling, spanning objective, variable, constraint, and implementation failures. We use this taxonomy to design OptArgus, a multi-agent detector with conductor routing, specialist auditors, and evidence consolidation. To evaluate this setting, we introduce a three-part benchmark suite with $484$ clean artifacts, $1266$ controlled injected artifacts, and $6292$ natural LLM-generated artifacts. Against a matched single-agent baseline, OptArgus produces fewer false alarms on clean artifacts, more accurate top-ranked localization on controlled single-error cases, and stronger detection on natural model outputs. Together, these contributions turn optimization-modeling hallucination detection into a concrete empirical problem and suggest that modular, taxonomy-grounded auditing is a practical route to more reliable optimization modeling.
CLJun 10, 2025Code
Scalable Medication Extraction and Discontinuation Identification from Electronic Health Records Using Large Language ModelsChong Shao, Douglas Snyder, Chiran Li et al. · harvard
Identifying medication discontinuations in electronic health records (EHRs) is vital for patient safety but is often hindered by information being buried in unstructured notes. This study aims to evaluate the capabilities of advanced open-sourced and proprietary large language models (LLMs) in extracting medications and classifying their medication status from EHR notes, focusing on their scalability on medication information extraction without human annotation. We collected three EHR datasets from diverse sources to build the evaluation benchmark. We evaluated 12 advanced LLMs and explored multiple LLM prompting strategies. Performance on medication extraction, medication status classification, and their joint task (extraction then classification) was systematically compared across all experiments. We found that LLMs showed promising performance on the medication extraction and discontinuation classification from EHR notes. GPT-4o consistently achieved the highest average F1 scores in all tasks under zero-shot setting - 94.0% for medication extraction, 78.1% for discontinuation classification, and 72.7% for the joint task. Open-sourced models followed closely, Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct achieved the highest performance in medication status classification on the MIV-Med dataset (68.7%) and in the joint task on both the Re-CASI (76.2%) and MIV-Med (60.2%) datasets. Medical-specific LLMs demonstrated lower performance compared to advanced general-domain LLMs. Few-shot learning generally improved performance, while CoT reasoning showed inconsistent gains. LLMs demonstrate strong potential for medication extraction and discontinuation identification on EHR notes, with open-sourced models offering scalable alternatives to proprietary systems and few-shot can further improve LLMs' capability.
CLJan 8
Can Large Language Models Resolve Semantic Discrepancy in Self-Destructive Subcultures? Evidence from Jirai KeiPeng Wang, Xilin Tao, Siyi Yao et al.
Self-destructive behaviors are linked to complex psychological states and can be challenging to diagnose. These behaviors may be even harder to identify within subcultural groups due to their unique expressions. As large language models (LLMs) are applied across various fields, some researchers have begun exploring their application for detecting self-destructive behaviors. Motivated by this, we investigate self-destructive behavior detection within subcultures using current LLM-based methods. However, these methods have two main challenges: (1) Knowledge Lag: Subcultural slang evolves rapidly, faster than LLMs' training cycles; and (2) Semantic Misalignment: it is challenging to grasp the specific and nuanced expressions unique to subcultures. To address these issues, we proposed Subcultural Alignment Solver (SAS), a multi-agent framework that incorporates automatic retrieval and subculture alignment, significantly enhancing the performance of LLMs in detecting self-destructive behavior. Our experimental results show that SAS outperforms the current advanced multi-agent framework OWL. Notably, it competes well with fine-tuned LLMs. We hope that SAS will advance the field of self-destructive behavior detection in subcultural contexts and serve as a valuable resource for future researchers.
CLMar 11, 2024
Guiding Clinical Reasoning with Large Language Models via Knowledge SeedsJiageng WU, Xian Wu, Jie Yang · harvard
Clinical reasoning refers to the cognitive process that physicians employ in evaluating and managing patients. This process typically involves suggesting necessary examinations, diagnosing patients' diseases, and deciding on appropriate therapies, etc. Accurate clinical reasoning requires extensive medical knowledge and rich clinical experience, setting a high bar for physicians. This is particularly challenging in developing countries due to the overwhelming number of patients and limited physician resources, contributing significantly to global health inequity and necessitating automated clinical reasoning approaches. Recently, the emergence of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 have demonstrated their potential in clinical reasoning. However, these LLMs are prone to hallucination problems, and the reasoning process of LLMs may not align with the clinical decision path of physicians. In this study, we introduce a novel framework, In-Context Padding (ICP), designed to enhance LLMs with medical knowledge. Specifically, we infer critical clinical reasoning elements (referred to as knowledge seeds) and use these as anchors to guide the generation process of LLMs. Experiments on two clinical question datasets demonstrate that ICP significantly improves the clinical reasoning ability of LLMs.
CLMar 11, 2024
MedKP: Medical Dialogue with Knowledge Enhancement and Clinical Pathway EncodingJiageng Wu, Xian Wu, Yefeng Zheng et al. · harvard
With appropriate data selection and training techniques, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional success in various medical examinations and multiple-choice questions. However, the application of LLMs in medical dialogue generation-a task more closely aligned with actual medical practice-has been less explored. This gap is attributed to the insufficient medical knowledge of LLMs, which leads to inaccuracies and hallucinated information in the generated medical responses. In this work, we introduce the Medical dialogue with Knowledge enhancement and clinical Pathway encoding (MedKP) framework, which integrates an external knowledge enhancement module through a medical knowledge graph and an internal clinical pathway encoding via medical entities and physician actions. Evaluated with comprehensive metrics, our experiments on two large-scale, real-world online medical consultation datasets (MedDG and KaMed) demonstrate that MedKP surpasses multiple baselines and mitigates the incidence of hallucinations, achieving a new state-of-the-art. Extensive ablation studies further reveal the effectiveness of each component of MedKP. This enhancement advances the development of reliable, automated medical consultation responses using LLMs, thereby broadening the potential accessibility of precise and real-time medical assistance.
CLSep 26, 2025
Why Chain of Thought Fails in Clinical Text UnderstandingJiageng Wu, Kevin Xie, Bowen Gu et al.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being applied to clinical care, a domain where both accuracy and transparent reasoning are critical for safe and trustworthy deployment. Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, which elicits step-by-step reasoning, has demonstrated improvements in performance and interpretability across a wide range of tasks. However, its effectiveness in clinical contexts remains largely unexplored, particularly in the context of electronic health records (EHRs), the primary source of clinical documentation, which are often lengthy, fragmented, and noisy. In this work, we present the first large-scale systematic study of CoT for clinical text understanding. We assess 95 advanced LLMs on 87 real-world clinical text tasks, covering 9 languages and 8 task types. Contrary to prior findings in other domains, we observe that 86.3\% of models suffer consistent performance degradation in the CoT setting. More capable models remain relatively robust, while weaker ones suffer substantial declines. To better characterize these effects, we perform fine-grained analyses of reasoning length, medical concept alignment, and error profiles, leveraging both LLM-as-a-judge evaluation and clinical expert evaluation. Our results uncover systematic patterns in when and why CoT fails in clinical contexts, which highlight a critical paradox: CoT enhances interpretability but may undermine reliability in clinical text tasks. This work provides an empirical basis for clinical reasoning strategies of LLMs, highlighting the need for transparent and trustworthy approaches.
CLJul 11, 2025
What Factors Affect LLMs and RLLMs in Financial Question Answering?Peng Wang, Xuesi Hu, Jiageng Wu et al.
Recently, the development of large language models (LLMs) and reasoning large language models (RLLMs) have gained considerable attention from many researchers. RLLMs enhance the reasoning capabilities of LLMs through Long Chain-of-Thought (Long CoT) processes, significantly improving the performance of LLMs in addressing complex problems. However, there are few works that systematically explore what methods can fully unlock the performance of LLMs and RLLMs within the financial domain. To investigate the impact of various methods on LLMs and RLLMs, we utilize five LLMs and three RLLMs to assess the effects of prompting methods, agentic frameworks, and multilingual alignment methods on financial question-answering tasks. Our research findings indicate: (1) Current prompting methods and agent frameworks enhance the performance of LLMs in financial question answering by simulating Long CoT; (2) RLLMs possess inherent Long CoT capabilities, which limits the effectiveness of conventional methods in further enhancing their performance; (3) Current advanced multilingual alignment methods primarily improve the multilingual performance of LLMs by extending the reasoning length, which yields minimal benefits for RLLMs. Additionally, we discuss strategies for enhancing the performance of LLMs and RLLMs in financial question answering, which may serve as a inspiration for future improvements. We hope that this study can serve as an important reference for LLMs and RLLMs in the field of financial question answering.
CLJun 17, 2024
FinTruthQA: A Benchmark Dataset for Evaluating the Quality of Financial Information DisclosureZiyue Xu, Peilin Zhou, Xinyu Shi et al.
Accurate and transparent financial information disclosure is essential in accounting and finance, fostering trust and enabling informed investment decisions that drive economic development. Among many information disclosure platforms, the Chinese stock exchanges' investor interactive platform provides a novel and interactive way for listed firms to disclose information of interest to investors through an online question-and-answer (Q&A) format. However, it is common for listed firms to respond to questions with limited or no substantive information, and automatically evaluating the quality of financial information disclosure on large amounts of Q&A pairs is challenging. In this study, our interdisciplinary team of AI and finance professionals proposed FinTruthQA, a benchmark designed to evaluate advanced natural language processing (NLP) techniques for the automatic quality assessment of information disclosure in financial Q&A data. It comprises 6,000 real-world financial Q&A entries and each Q&A was manually annotated based on four key evaluation criteria. We benchmarked various NLP techniques on FinTruthQA, including large language models(LLMs). Experiments showed that existing NLP models have strong predictive ability for question identification and question relevance tasks, but are suboptimal for answer readability and answer relevance tasks. By establishing this benchmark, we provide a robust foundation for the automatic evaluation of information disclosure, demonstrating how AI can be leveraged for social good by promoting transparency, fairness, and investor protection in financial disclosure practices. FinTruthQA can be used by auditors, regulators, and financial analysts for real-time monitoring and data-driven decision-making, as well as by researchers for advanced studies in accounting and finance, ultimately fostering greater trust and efficiency in the financial markets.
CLMay 17, 2023
Large Language Models Leverage External Knowledge to Extend Clinical Insight Beyond Language BoundariesJiageng Wu, Xian Wu, Zhaopeng Qiu et al.
$\textbf{Objectives}$: Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Med-PaLM have excelled in various medical question-answering tasks. However, these English-centric models encounter challenges in non-English clinical settings, primarily due to limited clinical knowledge in respective languages, a consequence of imbalanced training corpora. We systematically evaluate LLMs in the Chinese medical context and develop a novel in-context learning framework to enhance their performance. $\textbf{Materials and Methods}$: The latest China National Medical Licensing Examination (CNMLE-2022) served as the benchmark. We collected 53 medical books and 381,149 medical questions to construct the medical knowledge base and question bank. The proposed Knowledge and Few-shot Enhancement In-context Learning (KFE) framework leverages the in-context learning ability of LLMs to integrate diverse external clinical knowledge sources. We evaluated KFE with ChatGPT(GPT3.5), GPT4, Baichuan2(BC2)-7B, and BC2-13B in CNMLE-2022 and investigated the effectiveness of different pathways for incorporating LLMs with medical knowledge from 7 perspectives. $\textbf{Results}$: Directly applying ChatGPT failed to qualify for the CNMLE-2022 at a score of 51. Cooperated with the KFE, the LLMs with varying sizes yielded consistent and significant improvements. The ChatGPT's performance surged to 70.04 and GPT-4 achieved the highest score of 82.59. This surpasses the qualification threshold (60) and exceeds the average human score of 68.70. It also enabled a smaller BC2-13B to pass the examination, showcasing the great potential in low-resource settings. $\textbf{Conclusion}$: By synergizing medical knowledge through in-context learning, LLM can extend clinical insight beyond language barriers, significantly reducing language-related disparities of LLM applications and ensuring global benefit in healthcare.