CFP MultiClinSum (CLEF/BioASQ 2025): Multilingual Clinical Text Summarization Shared Task

https://temu.bsc.es/multiclinsum

The MultiClinSum shared task focuses on the automatic summarization of clinical texts in different languages, i.e. English, Spanish, French and Portuguese

Key Information:

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Web: https://temu.bsc.es/multiclinsum -

Data: https://zenodo.org/records/15463353 -

BioASQ: http://bioasq.org/ -

Registration: https://temu.bsc.es/multiclinsum/registration/

Motivation:

There is a rapid accumulation of various types of clinical content, including medical records and specialized publications such as clinical case reports. As a result, it is becoming increasingly challenging for healthcare professionals, biomedical researchers, and patients to process lengthy clinical documents in order to gain a clear understanding and overview of the key medical insights underlying patient conditions and outcomes.

This challenge applies not only to clinical content in English but also in other widely spoken languages such as Spanish, French, and Portuguese. Recent advances in automatic summarization and the use of large language models (LLMs) have shown promising results in condensing lengthy clinical texts into shorter summaries, effectively reducing their length while preserving essential clinical information.

Use cases and application scenarios for automatic clinical text summarization include:

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Clinical Decision Support: Summarization condenses of electronic health records (EHRs) into key events, diagnoses, medications, and outcomes, aiding timely and informed decisions. -

Patient Discharge Summaries: Automatically generate readable, concise summaries from detailed clinical notes, enhancing continuity of care and patient understanding. -

Medical Literature Review: Summarize key findings, methodologies, and outcomes from scientific articles to facilitate rapid literature reviews. -

Multilingual Clinical Communication: Summarization systems, combined with translation, enable understanding across language barriers by distilling essential content from foreign-language reports. -

Telemedicine & Remote Consultations: Summarized patient data supports fast review and focused diagnostics in remote care settings. -

Clinical Trial Screening: Summarized profiles can accelerate eligibility assessment by highlighting key inclusion/exclusion criteria. -

Medical Coding and Billing: Summarization helps highlight billable actions, diagnoses, and procedures to streamline medical coding workflows. -

Patient-Facing Summaries: Summarization tools can generate simplified or lay-language versions of complex medical content to improve patient engagement and health literacy.

In light of recent technological advances, there is a pressing need to evaluate and benchmark the effectiveness of clinical summarization for case reports written in different languages.

MultiClinSum focuses on the automatic summarization of full clinical case reports in multiple languages—namely English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. Since clinical case reports share certain similarities with electronic medical records, particularly discharge summaries, the insights derived from MultiClinSum may have practical relevance for clinical text analysis and various medical applications.

This task is based on a corpus of manually selected full clinical case reports along with their corresponding author-provided short summaries.

For evaluation purposes, automatically-generated summaries will be compared against human-generated summaries written by the original clinical authors, using Rouge-2 scores and BERTScore for evaluation assessment. The evaluation for each language will be done separately, and participants are encouraged to explore both monolingual and multilingual approaches as they wish. Thus the following sub-tasks will be posed: MultiClinSum-en (English data), MultiClinSum-es (Spanish data), MultiClinSum-fr (French data) and MultiClinSum-pt (Portuguese data).

Participating teams are requested to implement or evaluate automated systems that generate summaries from full clinical case reports.

Schedule

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MultiClinSum Sample Set Release: April 9th, 2025 -

MultiClinSum Train/Dev Set Release: May 16th, 2025 (updated!) -

MultiClinSum Test Set Texts Release: May 28th, 2025 (updated!) -

Participant Test Predictions Deadline: June 2nd, 2025 (updated!) -

Participant Evaluation Result Release: June 6th, 2025 (updated!) -

Submission of Participant Papers Deadline: June 18th, 2025 (updated!) -

Notification of Acceptance of Participant Papers: June 27th, 2025 -

Submission of Camera-ready Participant Papers Deadline: July 7th, 2025 -

BioASQ @ CLEF2025: September 9th-12th, 2025

Publications & Conference

Following previous BioASQ/CLEF efforts, participating teams will be invited to contribute a short system description paper for the CLEF 2025 proceedings and to give a brief presentation of their approach at the BioASQ workshop during the CLEF 2025 conference (September 9–12, 2025, in Madrid, Spain).

MultiClinSum Organizers

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Salvador Lima-López, Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Spain. -

Miguel Rodríguez-Ortega, Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Spain. -

Eduard Rodríguez-López, Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Spain. -

Carlos Escolano Peinado, Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Spain. -

Maite Melero Nogues, Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Spain. -

Martin Krallinger, Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Spain.

Scientific committee:

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Sophia Ananiadou, University of Manchester -

Horacio Saggion, Universitat Pompeu Fabra -

Simon Mille, ADAPT Research Centre, Dublin City University -

Georgios Katsimpras, National Center for Scientific Research Demokritos, Greece -

Anastasios Nentidis, National Center for Scientific Research Demokritos, Greece -

Anastasia Krithara, National Center for Scientific Research Demokritos, Greece