Team NLP4Health at ChemoTimelines 2025: Finetuning Large Language Models for Temporal Relation Extractions from Clinical Notes

Zhe Zhao, V.G.Vinod Vydiswaran


Abstract
Extracting chemotherapy timelines from clinical narratives is a challenging task, but critical for cancer research and practice. In this paper, we present our approach and the research investigation we conducted to participate in Subtask 1 of the ChemoTimelines 2025 shared task on predicting temporal relations between pre-identified events and time expressions. We evaluated multiple fine-tuned large language models for the task. We used supervised fine-tuning strategies for Llama3-8B model to classify temporal relations. Further, we set up zero-shot prompting for Qwen3-14B to normalize time expressions. We also pre-trained and fine-tuned a Llama3-3B model using unlabeled notes and achieved results comparable with the fine-tuned Llama3-8B model. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of fine-tuning and continual pre-training strategies in adapting large language models to domain-specific tasks.
Anthology ID:
2025.clinicalnlp-1.4
Volume:
Proceedings of the 7th Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop
Month:
October
Year:
2025
Address:
Virtual
Editors:
Asma Ben Abacha, Steven Bethard, Danielle Bitterman, Tristan Naumann, Kirk Roberts
Venues:
ClinicalNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
22–29
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.clinicalnlp-1.4/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhe Zhao and V.G.Vinod Vydiswaran. 2025. Team NLP4Health at ChemoTimelines 2025: Finetuning Large Language Models for Temporal Relation Extractions from Clinical Notes. In Proceedings of the 7th Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop, pages 22–29, Virtual. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Team NLP4Health at ChemoTimelines 2025: Finetuning Large Language Models for Temporal Relation Extractions from Clinical Notes (Zhao & Vydiswaran, ClinicalNLP 2025)
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https://aclanthology.org/2025.clinicalnlp-1.4.pdf