MIDAS_SYNUR at MEDIQA-SYNUR 2026: A Prompting Study for Clinical Observation Extraction from Nurse Dictation Transcriptions

Swetha Krishna Sriram, Akshitaa Sahoo


Abstract
This paper describes MIDAS_SYNUR, a system developed for the MEDIQA-SYNUR task at ClinicalNLP 2026 on observation extraction from nurse dictations. The primary system adopts a single-prompt, field-rich few-shot strategy using GPT-5.2, jointly generating all schema fields in one structured output. Few-shot demonstrations are curated and grouped by value type, with five examples per type, promoting consistency across heterogeneous value distributions while leveraging global context to resolve cross-field dependencies. To analyze design trade-offs, this holistic strategy is compared against a field-wise decomposed prompting baseline, where each schema field is extracted independently using explicit positive and NULL demonstrations to improve absence detection and reduce cross-field interference. Zero-shot variants of both approaches are also evaluated to isolate the contribution of in-context examples. The results highlight inference-time prompting as a simple, reproducible, and competitive baseline for large-scale clinical observation extraction from conversational nurse dictations. Keywords: Prompt Engineering, Few-Shot Prompting, In-Context Learning, Structured Output
Anthology ID:
2026.clinicalnlp-1.27
Volume:
Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Clinical Natural Language Processing (Clinical NLP) @ LREC 2026
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Editors:
Asma Ben Abacha, Steven Bethard, Danielle Bitterman, Tristan Naumann, Kirk Roberts
Venues:
ClinicalNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
244–250
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-clinicalnlp-27
DOI:
10.63317/4h7qk3596z83
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Swetha Krishna Sriram and Akshitaa Sahoo. 2026. MIDAS_SYNUR at MEDIQA-SYNUR 2026: A Prompting Study for Clinical Observation Extraction from Nurse Dictation Transcriptions. In Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Clinical Natural Language Processing (Clinical NLP) @ LREC 2026, pages 244–250, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
MIDAS_SYNUR at MEDIQA-SYNUR 2026: A Prompting Study for Clinical Observation Extraction from Nurse Dictation Transcriptions (Sriram & Sahoo, ClinicalNLP 2026)
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