EpiGator: An Event-based Surveillance System for Infectious Disease Outbreaks

Yiheng Wu, Jue Hou, Trangcasanchai Sathianpong, Lidia Pivovarova, Roman Yangarber


Abstract
We present EpiGator, a novel event-based system for global surveillance of outbreaks of infectious epidemics that automatically processes streams of news articles and generates reports about the outbreaks, which is crucial for medical authorities. The goal of our work is to combine our experience in outbreak surveillance with state-of-the-art large language models (LLM), which allows us to reduce the overall cost of system development and maintenance. The EpiGator pipeline combines keyword filtering, relevance classification, event-based clustering, and multi-document summarization. A key novelty lies in using a fine-tuned LLM to identify articles relevant to ongoing outbreaks, followed by a zero-shot information extraction pipeline that normalizes the event features and clusters the related articles. For each cluster, we generate an outbreak summary using instruction-tuned LLMs. We evaluate EpiGator output against disease outbreak reports written by medical specialists.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.614
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
7732–7743
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-614
DOI:
10.63317/5jrha624xs52
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yiheng Wu, Jue Hou, Trangcasanchai Sathianpong, Lidia Pivovarova, and Roman Yangarber. 2026. EpiGator: An Event-based Surveillance System for Infectious Disease Outbreaks. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 7732–7743, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
EpiGator: An Event-based Surveillance System for Infectious Disease Outbreaks (Wu et al., LREC 2026)
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