DrugClaw and DrugAudit: A Primary-Source-Grounded Agent and Authority-Aware Benchmark for Drug-Information Question Answering

Qing Wang, Bo Li, Jialu Liang, Daling Shi, Bob Zhang, Qianqian Song


Abstract
Drug-information question answering is a high-stakes setting where hallucinated facts can mislead clinical decision-making and the provenance of each cited fact matters as much as the fact itself. We present DrugClaw, a multi-agent retrieval-augmented system that queries a registry of drug and pharmacovigilance skills via a reflection-driven state-machine workflow and returns answers grounded in primary regulatory or peer-reviewed records. We also contribute DrugAudit, a 3,772-item authority-aware benchmark with an evaluation panel that scores upstream-of-gold source match, token-level semantic snippet overlap, and citation faithfulness under a dual-judge LLM-as-judge protocol with inter-judge κ = 0.88 (almost-perfect). Across DrugAudit plus drug-related subsets of MedQA (751) and PubMedQA (512), DrugClaw is top-1 on every column of the headline table: composite Evidence Index under both judges, judge-mediated answer correctness, primary-source rate (0.918, +10.1 pp over next-best), faithfulness (0.887, +5.9 pp), MedQA (0.920), and PubMedQA (0.693).
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.592
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
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SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
12486–12510
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.592/
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Qing Wang, Bo Li, Jialu Liang, Daling Shi, Bob Zhang, and Qianqian Song. 2026. DrugClaw and DrugAudit: A Primary-Source-Grounded Agent and Authority-Aware Benchmark for Drug-Information Question Answering. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 12486–12510, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
DrugClaw and DrugAudit: A Primary-Source-Grounded Agent and Authority-Aware Benchmark for Drug-Information Question Answering (Wang et al., Findings 2026)
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https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.592.pdf