ArgHiTZ at ArchEHR-QA 2025: A Two-Step Divide and Conquer Approach to Patient Question Answering for Top Factuality
This work addresses patient question answering in clinical settings, presenting an incremental improvement with a focus on factuality.
The paper tackled automated patient question answering by introducing a two-step divide-and-conquer approach, achieving an overall score of 0.44 and ranking top in factuality on the ArchEHR-QA 2025 leaderboard.
This work presents three different approaches to address the ArchEHR-QA 2025 Shared Task on automated patient question answering. We introduce an end-to-end prompt-based baseline and two two-step methods to divide the task, without utilizing any external knowledge. Both two step approaches first extract essential sentences from the clinical text, by prompt or similarity ranking, and then generate the final answer from these notes. Results indicate that the re-ranker based two-step system performs best, highlighting the importance of selecting the right approach for each subtask. Our best run achieved an overall score of 0.44, ranking 8th out of 30 on the leaderboard, securing the top position in overall factuality.