Patient-Centric Question Answering- Overview of the Shared Task at the Second Workshop on NLP and AI for Multilingual and Healthcare Communication

AbstractThis paper presents an overview of the Shared Task on Patient-Centric Question Answering, organized as part of the NLP-AI4Health workshop at IJCNLP. The task aims to bridge the digital divide in healthcare by developing inclusive systems for two critical domains: Head and Neck Cancer (HNC) and Cystic Fibrosis (CF). We introduce the NLP4Health-2025 Dataset, a novel, large-scale multilingual corpus consisting of more than 45,000 validated multi-turn dialogues between patients and healthcare providers across 10 languages: Assamese, Bangla, Dogri, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu. Participants were challenged to develop lightweight models (< 3 billion parameters) to perform two core activities: (1) Clinical Summarization, encompassing both abstractive summaries and structured clinical extraction (SCE), and (2) Patient-Centric QA, generating empathetic, factually accurate answers in the dialogue native language. This paper details the hybrid human-agent dataset construction pipeline, task definitions, evaluation metrics, and analyzes the performance of 9 submissions from 6 teams. The results demonstrate the viability of small language models (SLMs) in low-resource medical settings when optimized via techniques like LoRA and RAG.