Supervised Fine-Tuning or In-Context Learning? Evaluating LLMs for Clinical NER

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteur principal: Baroian, Andrei
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Baroian, Andrei
author_facet Baroian, Andrei
contents We study clinical Named Entity Recognition (NER) on the CADEC corpus and compare three families of approaches: (i) BERT-style encoders (BERT Base, BioClinicalBERT, RoBERTa-large), (ii) GPT-4o used with few-shot in-context learning (ICL) under simple vs.\ complex prompts, and (iii) GPT-4o with supervised fine-tuning (SFT). All models are evaluated on standard NER metrics over CADEC's five entity types (ADR, Drug, Disease, Symptom, Finding). RoBERTa-large and BioClinicalBERT offer limited improvements over BERT Base, showing the limit of these family of models. Among LLM settings, simple ICL outperforms a longer, instruction-heavy prompt, and SFT achieves the strongest overall performance (F1 $\approx$ 87.1%), albeit with higher cost. We find that the LLM achieve higher accuracy on simplified tasks, restricting classification to two labels.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_22285
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Supervised Fine-Tuning or In-Context Learning? Evaluating LLMs for Clinical NER
Baroian, Andrei
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
We study clinical Named Entity Recognition (NER) on the CADEC corpus and compare three families of approaches: (i) BERT-style encoders (BERT Base, BioClinicalBERT, RoBERTa-large), (ii) GPT-4o used with few-shot in-context learning (ICL) under simple vs.\ complex prompts, and (iii) GPT-4o with supervised fine-tuning (SFT). All models are evaluated on standard NER metrics over CADEC's five entity types (ADR, Drug, Disease, Symptom, Finding). RoBERTa-large and BioClinicalBERT offer limited improvements over BERT Base, showing the limit of these family of models. Among LLM settings, simple ICL outperforms a longer, instruction-heavy prompt, and SFT achieves the strongest overall performance (F1 $\approx$ 87.1%), albeit with higher cost. We find that the LLM achieve higher accuracy on simplified tasks, restricting classification to two labels.
title Supervised Fine-Tuning or In-Context Learning? Evaluating LLMs for Clinical NER
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22285