REVIEW 4 major objections 6 minor 52 references
PerMedCQA: Benchmarking Large Language Models on Medical Consumer Question Answering in Persian Language
T0 review · 4 major / 6 minor · reviewed 2026-08-07 · deepseek-v4-flash
Pith's one-line read PerMedCQA introduces the first large-scale Persian benchmark for consumer medical question answering, with 68,138 QA pairs and an LLM-based judge.
desk verdict The PerMedCQA dataset is a genuine new resource, but the paper as submitted has no results section, so the benchmark claims are unsupported. read the letter →
The pith
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
The reading
What carries the argument
The load-bearing mechanism is MedJudge, a large-language-model grader prompted with a three-part rubric: Correctness (correct, partially correct, incorrect, contradictory), Coverage (equal, model subset, expert subset, no overlap), and Clinical Impact (negligible, moderate, significant, critical). MedJudge is given the patient question, the verified-physician answer as gold, and the model answer, and is explicitly forbidden to use its own medical knowledge or outside sources. The dataset pipeline is the other half of the machinery: rule-based filters remove short, duplicate, or non-textual entries; GPT-4o-mini flags personally identifiable information; the same LLM assigns ICD-11 categories; and the benchmark is split into train, evaluation, and test sets stratified by ICD-11 category.
What would settle it
Take a random sample of PerMedCQA gold answers and have independent board-certified physicians, blinded to the forum posts, rate each answer's medical correctness against current guidelines; if a substantial fraction are judged inaccurate, incomplete, or outdated, the reference standard that MedJudge scores against is not reliable.
Extended reading notes
Core claim
The central claim is that PerMedCQA is the first Persian-language benchmark for consumer medical question answering, and that it is large and realistic enough to support meaningful evaluation. The dataset contains 68,138 QA pairs from four public Persian medical forums, restricted to questions from real patients and answers from verified physicians, and enriched with ICD-11 labels, 25 standardized question types, patient age and sex, physician specialty, and source metadata. The paper further claims that open-ended medical answers can be reliably scored by MedJudge, an LLM-based rubric grader that is instructed to judge only against the expert answer and that reached 75% agreement with board-certified physicians on the correctness dimension of a 100-item subset. On this basis the authors argue that multilingual and instruction-tuned models vary substantially on Persian consumer health questions and that prompt-based techniques and fine-tuning can change model output quality, with the detailed results deferred to a future revision.
Load-bearing premise
The benchmark treats answers posted by verified physicians on four public forums as the gold standard, and MedJudge is told to judge only against those answers; if those posts are medically wrong or incomplete, every model score inherits that error.
Editorial extensions
If this is right
- Persian-speaking patients can have medical QA systems evaluated on the kinds of questions they actually ask, rather than on translated exam questions.
- Researchers get a public, de-identified resource for fine-tuning and for comparing models in a low-resource language.
- The ICD-11 and question-type annotations allow analysis of which medical topics and question intents are hardest for current LLMs.
- The reported gender and topic distributions suggest that any deployed system must handle sexual health, digestive, and skin questions well to serve Persian forum users.
- MedJudge, if its agreement with physicians generalizes, offers an alternative to BLEU and ROUGE for open-ended medical evaluation in other languages.
Reading between the lines
- The reported 75% correctness agreement and quadratic Cohen's kappa of 0.42 between MedJudge and physicians are moderate; if a different judge model or prompt changes rankings, part of what is being measured is the judge, not the medical QA systems.
- Because the gold answers come from forum posts and MedJudge is barred from external knowledge, any systematic error in those posts, such as outdated or overly cautious advice, becomes part of the benchmark's definition of correctness.
- The text-only scope leaves out skin and visual-system questions, which are among the most common categories in the dataset; a multimodal extension would likely change model rankings.
- The translation-pivot experiments imply that English-centric models may lose information in Persian; testing the same models on native Persian outputs after fine-tuning would isolate how much of the gap is language coverage rather than medical knowledge.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The paper introduces PerMedCQA, a Persian-language corpus of 68,138 consumer health question-answer pairs collected from four public forums, cleaned with rule-based filtering and LLM-based PII detection, annotated with ICD-11 categories and question types, and split into stratified train/dev/test sets. It also proposes MedJudge, an LLM-based rubric grader that compares model answers against forum expert answers on Correctness, Coverage, and Clinical Impact, with a 100-item human validation study. The paper claims to benchmark 16 LLMs using zero-shot prompting, role-based prompting, pivot translation, and LoRA fine-tuning; however, Section 5, which would contain all results, is explicitly marked as under development, and no model scores or comparisons are reported anywhere in the manuscript.
Significance. If completed, PerMedCQA would be a valuable resource for Persian medical NLP: it is large, publicly released, derived from real consumer questions, and includes structured metadata and stratified splits. The MedJudge design is a sensible approach for open-ended QA, and the authors are transparent about the limitations of their human validation. Nevertheless, the current submission does not deliver its central benchmarking claim: the complete absence of results means the reader cannot assess whether the benchmark distinguishes models, whether MedJudge scores are stable, or whether the proposed prompting and fine-tuning methods have any measurable effect. As submitted, the paper is better described as a dataset resource than as a benchmark evaluation, and the abstract's claims about results are unsupported.
major comments (4)
- [5] Section 5 is empty, stating 'This section is currently under development and will be included in a future revision.' The abstract and Section 1 assert that extensive evaluations were performed and that the results highlight key challenges, but no model scores, tables, or comparisons appear in the main text or appendix; Figures 15-17 are only captions with no accompanying data. This is not a presentation issue: the central claim of the paper is benchmarking, and the results are the evidence for that claim. The manuscript cannot be accepted until the full Results section is included (baseline scores, prompt-method comparisons, fine-tuning comparisons, and MedJudge reliability analyses) and the abstract is made consistent with the content actually reported.
- [A.2] The human validation of MedJudge is too weak to support the claim of a clinically informed evaluation framework validated by expert reviews. The primary correctness dimension has 75% collapsed agreement with quadratic Cohen's kappa = 0.42 (95% CI 0.19-0.58), and the Clinical Impact dimension has kappa = 0.07, detecting only one-third of high-impact discrepancies. Since no downstream result shows that MedJudge separates strong from weak models or correlates with human judgments at scale, the evaluation framework's reliability is not established. Please report a confusion matrix, per-label precision and recall, and a sensitivity analysis of model rankings when the grader model or rubric is changed.
- [3.1] The gold standard is assumed to be the answers posted by verified physicians on four forums, and MedJudge is explicitly instructed to judge exclusively against these answers and ignore external knowledge (A.1). If the forum answers are incomplete or contain systematic errors, every model score inherits those errors. The paper provides no evidence that the gold answers are clinically acceptable. The authors should validate a random sample of gold answers with independent expert review, or construct references through consensus, and report the resulting agreement.
- [3.3] ICD-11 and question-type labels are generated by GPT-4o-mini without any reported accuracy or human agreement. These labels are load-bearing: the test split is stratified by ICD-11 category, and the role-based prompting in Section 4.3 conditions on them. Label noise could distort both the evaluation split and the prompt conditions. Please report annotation accuracy on a human-annotated sample and, ideally, a sensitivity analysis showing that key conclusions are robust to label noise.
minor comments (6)
- [3.3] The text says 'Figure 6 shows the distribution of ICD-11 categories,' but Figure 6 is titled 'Distribution of Question Type' and Figure 5 already shows the ICD-11 distribution; the cross-references and captions should be corrected.
- [Abstract] The abstract states PerMedCQA is 'the first Persian-language benchmark,' while Section 1 uses the more careful phrase 'To the best of our knowledge.' The abstract should either match that qualification or report a systematic search for prior Persian medical QA resources.
- [4.1] MedJudge is described in the contributions as a novel evaluation framework, but Section 4.1 states it is 'based on the criteria (Hosseini et al., 2024)'; please clarify which components are new to this work.
- [Figure 1] Figure 1 contains the typo 'DIFFRENTTECHNIQUES,' and Figure 13 uses 'MedJude' while the rest of the paper uses 'MedJudge'; these should be harmonized.
- [References] The reference for PaLM (Chowdhery et al., 2023) is malformed, containing an unrelated string of author names, and several URL-only entries (e.g., Claude3.5, GetZoop) lack access dates; the bibliography needs a careful cleanup.
- [3.2] The phrasing 'resulting the final numbers QA pairs' should be revised to 'resulting in the final number of QA pairs,' and in Section 3.3 'PerMedCQA were split' should be 'PerMedCQA was split.'
Circularity Check
No significant circularity: the dataset, MedJudge rubric, and human validation are externally grounded; the missing Results section is an incompleteness issue, not an input–output loop.
full rationale
The paper's central resource claim is that PerMedCQA is a Persian consumer medical QA dataset built from public forum question–answer pairs and annotated with ICD-11 categories and question types. The evaluation chain uses MedJudge, an LLM-as-a-judge grader that compares model answers against the verified-physician expert answers using a rubric, and MedJudge is independently checked on a 100-item subset against board-certified physician ratings (75% collapsed agreement, quadratic Cohen's κ = 0.42, τ = 0.41, p < 0.001). This human validation is external to the evaluated models: the grader's reliability is not established by the models it later scores, and the human ratings do not depend on any fitted parameter from the benchmark. The gold answers themselves come from forum physicians rather than from the evaluated systems, so using them as the reference standard is a dataset-construction choice, not a self-referential derivation. The ICD-11 and question-type labels were produced by GPT-4o-mini and later used to condition role-based prompts, but these labels are data annotations rather than predictions of the benchmark outcome, and the final evaluation still runs through MedJudge against the expert answers rather than through the annotations. There are no equations in the paper that define the claimed result in terms of its inputs, and there is no fitted parameter that is renamed as a prediction. The most serious flaw in the manuscript is that Section 5 is explicitly marked “under development and will be included in a future revision,” so the abstract's claim that the results highlight key challenges is unsupported by any presented scores. That is a severe completeness and correctness risk, but it is not circularity. For the circularity dimension, the derivation chain is self-contained and externally grounded, so the appropriate score is 0.
Assumptions & free parameters
assumptions (3)
- domain assumption Forum expert answers are medically accurate gold references.
- domain assumption GPT-4o-mini PII detection and ICD-11 tagging are sufficiently accurate for the full dataset.
- domain assumption The 25 question-type taxonomy (Abacha et al., 2019) and 28 ICD-11 categories are appropriate for Persian consumer questions.
Cite this review
Pith. "Pith review of PerMedCQA: Benchmarking Large Language Models on Medical Consumer Question Answering in Persian Language." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/ZNPNTZ5C
@misc{pith2026250518331,
author = {Pith},
title = {Pith review of: PerMedCQA: Benchmarking Large Language Models on Medical Consumer Question Answering in Persian Language},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/ZNPNTZ5C}},
note = {Machine review of arXiv:2505.18331}
}
read the original abstract
Medical consumer question answering (CQA) is crucial for empowering patients by providing personalized and reliable health information. Despite recent advances in large language models (LLMs) for medical QA, consumer-oriented and multilingual resources, particularly in low-resource languages like Persian, remain sparse. To bridge this gap, we present PerMedCQA, the first Persian-language benchmark for evaluating LLMs on real-world, consumer-generated medical questions. Curated from a large medical QA forum, PerMedCQA contains 68,138 question-answer pairs, refined through careful data cleaning from an initial set of 87,780 raw entries. We evaluate several state-of-the-art multilingual and instruction-tuned LLMs, utilizing MedJudge, a novel rubric-based evaluation framework driven by an LLM grader, validated against expert human annotators. Our results highlight key challenges in multilingual medical QA and provide valuable insights for developing more accurate and context-aware medical assistance systems. The data is publicly available on https://huggingface.co/datasets/NaghmehAI/PerMedCQA
Figures
Figures from the paper (12 more)
Reference graph
Works this paper leans on
-
[1]
Correct: Clinically equivalent; no mean- ingful differences
-
[2]
Partially_correct: Minor deviations, no significant clinical impact
-
[3]
InProceedings of the 23rd Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing, pages 277–294
K-qa: A real-world medical q&a benchmark. InProceedings of the 23rd Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing, pages 277–294. Mavara-e-Teb. 2025.https://mavarateb.com. Xiangbin Meng, Xiangyu Yan, Kuo Zhang, Da Liu, Xi- aojuan Cui, Yaodong Yang, Muhan Zhang, Chunxia Cao, Jingjia Wang, Xuliang Wang, and 1 others. 2024. The application of large lang...
arXiv 2025
-
[4]
arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.18416
Capabilities of gemini models in medicine. arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.18416. Xiaoming Shi, Zeming Liu, Li Du, Yuxuan Wang, Hon- gru Wang, Yuhang Guo, Tong Ruan, Jie Xu, Xiaofan Zhang, and Shaoting Zhang. 2024. Medical dialogue system: A survey of categories, methods, evaluation and challenges.Findings of the Association for Com- putational Linguistics ACL ...
arXiv 2024
-
[5]
(5A00–5D46) Endocrine, nutritional or metabolic dis- eases
-
[6]
(6A00–6E8Z) Mental, behavioural or neurodevelop- mental disorders
-
[7]
InPro- ceedings of the AAAI conference on artificial intelli- gence, volume 38, pages 19368–19376
Zhongjing: Enhancing the chinese medical 10 capabilities of large language model through expert feedback and real-world multi-turn dialogue. InPro- ceedings of the AAAI conference on artificial intelli- gence, volume 38, pages 19368–19376. Guangtao Zeng, Wenmian Yang, Zeqian Ju, Yue Yang, Sicheng Wang, Ruisi Zhang, Meng Zhou, Jiaqi Zeng, Xiangyu Dong, Ruo...
work page 2020
-
[8]
(8A00–8E7Z) Diseases of the nervous system
Show all 52 references
-
[9]
InProceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Compu- tational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstra- tions), Bangkok, Thailand
Llamafactory: Unified efficient fine-tuning of 100+ language models. InProceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Compu- tational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstra- tions), Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computa- tional Linguistics. A Appendix A.1 ...
-
[10]
(AA00–AC0Z) Diseases of the ear or mastoid process
-
[11]
(BA00–BE2Z) Diseases of the circulatory system
-
[12]
Incorrect: Substantial differences that affect accuracy or completeness
-
[13]
•Coverage:
Contradictory: Model advice directly conflicts with the expert reference. •Coverage:
-
[14]
Equal: Both answers contain the same key facts
-
[15]
Model_subset: Model omits critical facts present in the expert answer
-
[16]
Expert_subset: Model introduces rele- vant facts not found in the expert answer
-
[17]
•Clinical_impact: 11
Overlap_none: No substantial factual overlap. •Clinical_impact: 11
-
[18]
Negligible: No effect on care or under- standing
-
[19]
Moderate: Slight effect on treatment or comprehension
-
[20]
Significant: Likely to affect recommen- dations or outcomes
-
[21]
ac- ceptable
Critical: May result in unsafe or harmful guidance. ReliabilityTo assess the reliability of Med- Judge, we compared its labels against blinded ratings from board-certified physicians on a 100- item subset. Agreement on the primary dimen- sion—correctness—was 75% (collapsed to ...
-
[22]
Return only the integer (1–28) that best corresponds to the core subject matter
ICD-11 Classification Classify the content based on ICD-11 categories using the catalogue provided in the next page. Return only the integer (1–28) that best corresponds to the core subject matter
-
[23]
identity
PII Detection Check if any personal information of the patient or expert is exposed in the messages. Personal information includes examples such as real name, address, phone number, email, etc. If such information exists, set "identity" to true; otherwise, set it tofalse. Figu...
-
[24]
(1A00–1H0Z) Certain infectious or parasitic diseases
-
[25]
(2A00–2F9Z) Neoplasms
-
[26]
(3A00–3C0Z) Diseases of the blood or blood-forming organs
-
[27]
(4A00–4B4Z) Diseases of the immune system
-
[28]
Med-Judge
(XA0060–XY9U) Extension Codes 13 Table 3: Question Type Categories. Question Type Definition Example Information Asks for general identification or classifica- tion of a drug. What type of drug is am- phetamine? Dose Queries recommended or safe dosage. What is a daily amount o...
-
[30]
(7A00–7B2Z) Sleep-wake disorders
-
[32]
(9A00–9E1Z) Diseases of the visual system
-
[35]
(CA00–CB7Z) Diseases of the respiratory system
-
[36]
(DA00–DE2Z) Diseases of the digestive system
-
[37]
(EA00–EM0Z) Diseases of the skin
-
[38]
(FA00–FC0Z) Diseases of the musculoskeletal system or connective tissue
-
[39]
(GA00–GC8Z) Diseases of the genitourinary system
-
[40]
(HA00–HA8Z) Conditions related to sexual health
-
[41]
(JA00–JB6Z) Pregnancy, childbirth or the puerperium
-
[42]
(KA00–KD5Z) Certain conditions originating in the perinatal period
-
[43]
(LA00–LD9Z) Developmental anomalies
-
[44]
(MA00–MH2Y) Symptoms, signs or clinical findings, not elsewhere classified
-
[45]
(NA00–NF2Z) Injury, poisoning or other conse- quences of external causes
-
[46]
(PA00–PL2Z) External causes of morbidity or mortal- ity
-
[47]
(QA00–QF4Z) Factors influencing health status or con- tact with health services
-
[48]
(RA00–RA26) Codes for special purposes
-
[49]
(SA00–SJ3Z) Traditional Medicine Conditions – Mod- ule I
-
[50]
(V A00–VC50) Functioning assessment
-
[52]
2.Step-by-step and Explainable Evaluation: • Provide a brief and concise comparison analysis (brief_analysis), clearly explaining your evaluation
Exclusivity:Base your judgmentonly on the Expert’s provided answer, and never rely on your own medical knowledge or external resources. 2.Step-by-step and Explainable Evaluation: • Provide a brief and concise comparison analysis (brief_analysis), clearly explaining your evalua...
-
[2019]
InProceedings of the 18th BioNLP Workshop and Shared Task, pages 250–260, Florence, Italy
ChiMed: A Chinese medical corpus for ques- tion answering. InProceedings of the 18th BioNLP Workshop and Shared Task, pages 250–260, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics. Augustin Toma, Patrick R Lawler, Jimmy Ba, Rahul G Krishnan, Barry B Rubin, and Bo W...
2023 arXiv
-
[2020]
HiSalamat
Measuring massive multitask language under- standing.arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.03300. HiSalamat. 2025.https://www.hisalamat.com. Pedram Hosseini, Jessica M Sin, Bing Ren, Bryce- ton G Thomas, Elnaz Nouri, Ali Farahanchi, and Saeed Hassanpour. 2024. A benchmark for long- form m...
2009 arXiv
-
[2023]
Baize: An open-source chat model with parameter-efficient tuning on self-chat data.arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.01196. An Yang, Anfeng Li, Baosong Yang, Beichen Zhang, Binyuan Hui, Bo Zheng, Bowen Yu, Chang Gao, Chengen Huang, Chenxu Lv, Chujie Zheng, Day- iheng Liu, Fan Zhou, Fe...
2025 arXiv
-
[2024]
LLaMA4Scout
Deepseek-v3 technical report.arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.19437. LLaMA4Scout. 2025. https://ai.meta.com/blog/ llama-4-multimodal-intelligence/. Jenish Maharjan, Anurag Garikipati, Navan Preet Singh, Leo Cyrus, Mayank Sharma, Madalina Ciobanu, Gina Barnes, Rahul Thapa, Qingqing Ma...
2025 arXiv
-
[2025]
InProceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, vol- ume 39, pages 26039–26047
Carebot: A pioneering full-process open- source medical language model. InProceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, vol- ume 39, pages 26039–26047. Lianmin Zheng, Wei-Lin Chiang, Ying Sheng, Siyuan Zhuang, Zhanghao Wu, Yonghao Zhuang, Zi Lin, Zhuohan Li, D...
2023 arXiv
Reviewed August 7, 2026 · model on record in the stance chip above.
Discussion (0). Continue with ORCID to comment.