PAINT: A Framework for Multilingual Pain Representation from Medical Licensing Exams to Real-World Clinical Texts

Boya Zhang, Yuanchao Ma, Jiageng Wu, Krittaphas Chaisutyakorn, Rodrigo Gameiro, Ahram Han, Chien-Yu Huang, Nikhil Jaiswal, Marianna Leite, Miriam Mora-Mau, Jaime Alonso Pineda Moreno, Siena Kathleen V. Placino, Ryohei Yamamoto, Yugang Jia, Jie Yang, Leo Anthony Celi, Douglas Teodoro


Abstract
Pain is one of the most common and clinically important symptoms, reflecting disease onset, progression, and treatment response. However, pain is difficult to accurately capture and interpret from medical text, as its expression varies across languages, documentation types, and patient demographics, and is often embedded in terminology, negation, temporality, and contextual descriptions. Existing pain-related studies remain largely monolingual or limited to narrow clinical settings. In this study, we introduce PAINT, a multilingual framework for studying pain representation across medical exams and real-world clinical texts. PAINT includes nine pain-focused dataset partitions spanning English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese, with clinician annotations in all four languages. We curated a structured schema covering pain relevance, pain presence, anatomical location, pain descriptors, and demographic information. To capture multilingual pain representations, we leverage large language models (LLMs) and adopt an ensemble strategy to improve performance. Ten clinicians across four languages validate the labels: the ensemble reaches macro-F1 of 0.91–1.00 on pain relevance and pain presence and 92–100% accuracy on demographics, with inter-annotator κ of 0.82–1.00. We release the WorldMedQA-Pain ensemble labels, the extraction pipeline, validation scripts, and clinician annotation sheets for publicly licensed corpora, providing a foundation for pain-centered clinical NLP and for studying pain documentation across languages and healthcare contexts.
Anthology ID:
2026.mrl-1.51
Volume:
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Multilingual Representation Learning (MRL 2026)
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Jesujoba Alabi, Catherine Arnett, Tyler Chang, C.M. Downey, Omer Goldman, Senyu Li, Lester James Validad Miranda, Jirui Qi, David Stap, Genta Indra Winata, Xinyu Crystina Zhang
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MRL | WS
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
684–701
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.mrl-1.51/
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Cite (ACL):
Boya Zhang, Yuanchao Ma, Jiageng Wu, Krittaphas Chaisutyakorn, Rodrigo Gameiro, Ahram Han, Chien-Yu Huang, Nikhil Jaiswal, Marianna Leite, Miriam Mora-Mau, Jaime Alonso Pineda Moreno, Siena Kathleen V. Placino, Ryohei Yamamoto, Yugang Jia, Jie Yang, Leo Anthony Celi, and Douglas Teodoro. 2026. PAINT: A Framework for Multilingual Pain Representation from Medical Licensing Exams to Real-World Clinical Texts. In Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Multilingual Representation Learning (MRL 2026), pages 684–701, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PAINT: A Framework for Multilingual Pain Representation from Medical Licensing Exams to Real-World Clinical Texts (Zhang et al., MRL 2026)
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https://aclanthology.org/2026.mrl-1.51.pdf