ArchEHR-QA 2026 (pronounced ��Archer��): CL4Health @LREC 2026 Shared Task on Grounded Question Answering (QA) from Electronic Health Records (EHRs)

Website: https://archehr-qa.github.io/ Dataset (PhysioNet): https://doi.org/10.13026/zzax-sy62

Responding to patients�� inbox messages through patient portals is a major contributor to clinician workload. ArchEHR-QA focuses on automatically answering patients�� health-related questions using their own EHR notes, with an emphasis on producing answers that are grounded in (and explicitly linked to) supporting clinical evidence in the notes.

Task Overview ArchEHR-QA 2026 is the second iteration of this shared task (following the ACL 2025 BioNLP edition). This year expands the dataset and introduces four complementary subtasks. Teams may participate in any subset of subtasks, and separate leaderboards will be maintained for each subtask.

Subtasks: 1) Subtask 1 �� Question Interpretation: Transform a free-text patient-authored question into a concise clinician-interpreted question (�� 15 words).

2) Subtask 2 �� Evidence Identification: Select the minimal set of sentence IDs from the provided note excerpt that supports answering the question.

3) Subtask 3 �� Answer Generation: Generate an answer grounded in the provided note excerpt (�� 75 words).

4) Subtask 4 �� Evidence Alignment: For each answer sentence, identify the supporting note sentence(s) (sentence-level answer�Cevidence alignment).

This year��s shared task follows a staged test data release schedule, with separate deadlines for Subtask 1, Subtasks 2�C3, and Subtask 4.

Important Dates (Tentative)

* First call for participation / Release of development dataset: January 2 (Friday), 2026 * Test dataset release: * Subtask 1: January 19 (Monday), 2026 * Subtasks 2�C3: January 26 (Monday), 2026 * Subtask 4: February 16 (Monday), 2026 * Submission of system responses: * Subtask 1: January 26 (Monday), 2026 * Subtasks 2�C3: February 16 (Monday), 2026 * Subtask 4: March 2 (Monday), 2026 * Submission of shared task papers (optional): March 13 (Friday), 2026 * Notification of acceptance: March 24 (Tuesday), 2026 * Camera-ready system papers due: March 31 (Tuesday), 2026 * CL4Health Workshop Date (LREC 2026): May 12 (Tuesday), 2026

For more information about participation and submission, please visit the shared task website.

Join our Google Group (recommended) Google Group: https://groups.google.com/g/archehr-qa For questions, please use the Google Group or email: sarvesh.soni@nih.govmailto:sarvesh.soni@nih.gov

Program Committee We are also looking for people to join the program committee (responsibilities include reviewing papers). If you are interested, please email sarvesh.soni@nih.govmailto:sarvesh.soni@nih.gov.

Looking forward to your participation,

Organizers: Sarvesh Soni, U.S. National Library of Medicine, NIH Dina Demner-Fushman, U.S. National Library of Medicine, NIH