Do LLMs Provide Consistent Answers to Health-Related Questions across Languages?

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Schlicht, Ipek Baris, Zhao, Zhixue, Sayin, Burcu, Flek, Lucie, Rosso, Paolo
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Schlicht, Ipek Baris
Zhao, Zhixue
Sayin, Burcu
Flek, Lucie
Rosso, Paolo
author_facet Schlicht, Ipek Baris
Zhao, Zhixue
Sayin, Burcu
Flek, Lucie
Rosso, Paolo
contents Equitable access to reliable health information is vital for public health, but the quality of online health resources varies by language, raising concerns about inconsistencies in Large Language Models (LLMs) for healthcare. In this study, we examine the consistency of responses provided by LLMs to health-related questions across English, German, Turkish, and Chinese. We largely expand the HealthFC dataset by categorizing health-related questions by disease type and broadening its multilingual scope with Turkish and Chinese translations. We reveal significant inconsistencies in responses that could spread healthcare misinformation. Our main contributions are 1) a multilingual health-related inquiry dataset with meta-information on disease categories, and 2) a novel prompt-based evaluation workflow that enables sub-dimensional comparisons between two languages through parsing. Our findings highlight key challenges in deploying LLM-based tools in multilingual contexts and emphasize the need for improved cross-lingual alignment to ensure accurate and equitable healthcare information.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_14719
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Do LLMs Provide Consistent Answers to Health-Related Questions across Languages?
Schlicht, Ipek Baris
Zhao, Zhixue
Sayin, Burcu
Flek, Lucie
Rosso, Paolo
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Human-Computer Interaction
Information Retrieval
Equitable access to reliable health information is vital for public health, but the quality of online health resources varies by language, raising concerns about inconsistencies in Large Language Models (LLMs) for healthcare. In this study, we examine the consistency of responses provided by LLMs to health-related questions across English, German, Turkish, and Chinese. We largely expand the HealthFC dataset by categorizing health-related questions by disease type and broadening its multilingual scope with Turkish and Chinese translations. We reveal significant inconsistencies in responses that could spread healthcare misinformation. Our main contributions are 1) a multilingual health-related inquiry dataset with meta-information on disease categories, and 2) a novel prompt-based evaluation workflow that enables sub-dimensional comparisons between two languages through parsing. Our findings highlight key challenges in deploying LLM-based tools in multilingual contexts and emphasize the need for improved cross-lingual alignment to ensure accurate and equitable healthcare information.
title Do LLMs Provide Consistent Answers to Health-Related Questions across Languages?
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Human-Computer Interaction
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.14719