Russ Altman
Author directoryAlso published as: Russ B Altman
2026
FDARxBench: Benchmarking regulatory and clinical reasoning on FDA generic drug assessment
Betty Xiong | Jillian Fisher | Benjamin Newman | Meng Hu | Shivangi Gupta | Yejin Choi | Lanyan Fang | Russ B Altman
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Betty Xiong | Jillian Fisher | Benjamin Newman | Meng Hu | Shivangi Gupta | Yejin Choi | Lanyan Fang | Russ B Altman
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
We introduce an expert-guided, real-world benchmark for evaluating document-grounded question-answering (QA) motivated by generic drug assessment, using the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) drug label documents. Drug labels contain rich but heterogeneous clinical and regulatory information, making accurate question answering difficult for current language models. In collaboration with FDA regulatory assessors, we introduce FDARxBench, and construct a multi-stage pipeline for generating high-quality, expert-guided, LLM-assisted, QA examples spanning factual, multi-hop, and refusal tasks, and design evaluation protocols to assess both open-book and closed-book reasoning. Experiments across proprietary and open-weight models reveal substantial gaps in factual grounding, long-context retrieval, and safe refusal behavior. While motivated by FDA generic drug assessment needs, this benchmark also provides a substantial foundation for challenging regulatory-grade evaluation of label comprehension.
2023
Detecting Contradictory COVID-19 Drug Efficacy Claims from Biomedical Literature
Daniel Sosa | Malavika Suresh | Christopher Potts | Russ Altman
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Daniel Sosa | Malavika Suresh | Christopher Potts | Russ Altman
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
The COVID-19 pandemic created a deluge of questionable and contradictory scientific claims about drug efficacy – an “infodemic” with lasting consequences for science and society. In this work, we argue that NLP models can help domain experts distill and understand the literature in this complex, high-stakes area. Our task is to automatically identify contradictory claims about COVID-19 drug efficacy. We frame this as a natural language inference problem and offer a new NLI dataset created by domain experts. The NLI framing allows us to create curricula combining existing datasets and our own. The resulting models are useful investigative tools. We provide a case study of how these models help a domain expert summarize and assess evidence concerning remdisivir and hydroxychloroquine.