UIC-AIHealth4All at ArchEHR-QA 2026: Answer-First Evidence Grounding for Clinical Question Answering
arXiv:2608.27467v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We describe the UIC-AIHealth4All system for ArchEHR-QA 2026, a shared task on grounded question answering from electronic health records. We participated in Subtasks 2 (evidence identification), 3 (answer generation), and 4 (answer-evidence alignment). For Subtasks 2 and 3, we propose an answer-first pipeline in which the model generates candidate answers citing specific note sentences before classifying the full evidence set, exploiting the asymmetry between judging relevance in the abstract versus relative to a generated answer. For Subtask 4, we apply self-consistency voting over five independent model calls, retaining links by vote threshold. Our pipeline ranked third on evidence identification (Strict Micro F1 62.90), ninth on answer generation (Overall 31.90), and fifth on answer-evidence alignment (F1 79.81). A post-hoc linguistic analysis of 45 stylistic features reveals that model outputs remain 3.2 Flesch-Kincaid grade levels harder to read than clinician-authored references despite matching their word and sentence counts, suggesting readability warrants explicit optimization in clinical NLP systems. Code and prompts are available at https://github.com/mo-arvan/archehr-qa-2026-uic-aihealth4all.
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[Submitted on 21 Jul 2026]
Title:UIC-AIHealth4All at ArchEHR-QA 2026: Answer-First Evidence Grounding for Clinical Question Answering
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Abstract:We describe the UIC-AIHealth4All system for ArchEHR-QA 2026, a shared task on grounded question answering from electronic health records. We participated in Subtasks 2 (evidence identification), 3 (answer generation), and 4 (answer-evidence alignment). For Subtasks 2 and 3, we propose an answer-first pipeline in which the model generates candidate answers citing specific note sentences before classifying the full evidence set, exploiting the asymmetry between judging relevance in the abstract versus relative to a generated answer. For Subtask 4, we apply self-consistency voting over five independent model calls, retaining links by vote threshold. Our pipeline ranked third on evidence identification (Strict Micro F1 62.90), ninth on answer generation (Overall 31.90), and fifth on answer-evidence alignment (F1 79.81). A post-hoc linguistic analysis of 45 stylistic features reveals that model outputs remain 3.2 Flesch-Kincaid grade levels harder to read than clinician-authored references despite matching their word and sentence counts, suggesting readability warrants explicit optimization in clinical NLP systems. Code and prompts are available at this https URL.
Comments: 10 pages, 2 figures, 6 tables. System description paper for the UIC-AIHealth4All submission to the ArchEHR-QA 2026 shared task, presented at the CL4Health workshop, LREC 2026
Subjects:
Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC)
ACM classes: I.2.7; H.3.3; J.3
Cite as: arXiv:2608.27467 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2608.27467v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.27467
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
Journal reference: Proceedings of CL4Health @ LREC 2026
Submission history
From: Mohammad Arvan [view email] [v1] Tue, 21 Jul 2026 20:29:35 UTC (53 KB)
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