license: mit
PerMedCQA: Persian Medical Consumer QA Benchmark
PerMedCQA: Benchmarking Large Language Models on Medical Consumer Question Answering in Persian
PerMedCQA is the first large-scale, real-world benchmark for Persian-language medical consumer question answering. It contains anonymized medical inquiries from Persian-speaking users paired with professional responses, enabling rigorous evaluation of large language models in low-resource, health-related domains.
📊 Dataset Overview
Total entries: 68,138 QA pairs
Source platforms: DrYab, HiSalamat, GetZoop, Mavara-e-Teb
Timeframe: Nov 10, 2022 – Apr 2, 2024
Languages: Persian only
Licensing: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
🔗 Paper
🧬 Metadata & Features
Each example in the dataset includes:
instance_id: Unique ID for each QA pairTitle: Short user-submitted titleQuestion: Full Persian-language consumer medical questionExpert_Answer: Doctor’s responseCategory: Medical topic (e.g., “پوست و مو”)Specialty: Expert’s medical field (e.g., “متخصص پوست و مو”)Age: Reported patient ageWeight: Reported weight (optional)Sex: Patient gender ("man"or"woman")dataset_source: Name of the platform (e.g., DrYab, Getzoop)Tag: ICD‑11 label and rationaleQuestionType: Question classification tag (e.g., "Contraindication", "Indication") and reasoning
📁 Dataset Structure
{
"Title": "قرمزی پوست نوزاد بعد از استفاده از پماد",
"Category": "پوست و مو",
"Specialty": "متخصص پوست و مو",
"Age": "1",
"Weight": "10",
"Sex": "man",
"dataset_source": "HiSalamat",
"instance_id": 32405,
"Tag": {
"Tag": 23,
"Tag_Reasoning": "The question addresses a skin reaction in an infant following the application of a cream, indicating a dermatological condition."
},
"Question": "سلام خسته نباشید. من واسه پسر ۱ سالهام که جای واکسنش سفت شده بود، پماد موضعی استفاده کردم. ولی الان پوستش خیلی قرمز شده و خارش داره. ممکنه حساسیت داده باشه؟ باید چکار کنم؟",
"Expert_Answer": "احتمالا پوست نوزاد به ترکیبات پماد حساسیت نشان داده است. مصرف آن را قطع کنید و در صورت ادامه علائم به متخصص پوست مراجعه کنید.",
"QuestionType": {
"Explanation": "The user asks about an adverse skin reaction following the use of a topical medication on an infant, which is a case of possible side effects.",
"QuestionType_Tag": "SideEffect"
}
}
📥 How to Load
from datasets import load_dataset
ds = load_dataset("NaghmehAI/PerMedCQA", split="train")
print(ds[0])
🚀 Intended Uses
- 🧠 Evaluation of multilingual or Persian-specific LLMs in real-world, informal medical domains
- 🛠️ Few-shot or zero-shot fine-tuning, instruction-tuning
- 🌍 Cultural insights: Persian language behavior in health-related discourse
- ⚠️ NOT for clinical use: Informational and research purposes only
⚙️ Data Processing Pipeline
Stage 1: Column Transformation (change_columns.py)
- Reads CSV/JSON input and transforms them into structured JSON format
- Handles single-turn, multi-turn, and multi-expert Q&A data
- Cleans and formats the text, removing unnecessary whitespace and newlines
- Creates a chat-style JSON file with
userandassistantroles
Stage 2: QA Preprocessing (preprocess_for_qa.py)
- Truncates multi-turn dialogues to first Q&A pair
- Removes:
- Empty or invalid messages
- Q&A pairs shorter than 3 words
- Duplicate Q&A instances
- Adds:
dataset_sourceandinstance_idto each item
- Merges cleaned records into
All_QA_preprocessed.json
Dataset Cleaning Results:
| Dataset | Step 1 Removed | Step 2 Removed | Step 3 Removed | Final Records |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dr_Yab | 63 | 1083 | 25 | 37,905 |
| GetZoop | 1005 | 1352 | 8 | 25,502 |
| Hi-Salamat | 9580 | 121 | 1 | 5,220 |
| Mavara-e-Teb | 0 | 1034 | 92 | 4,789 |
📚 Citation
If you use PerMedCQA, please cite:
@misc{jamali2025permedcqa,
title={PerMedCQA: Benchmarking Large Language Models on Medical Consumer Question Answering in Persian Language},
author={Jamali, Naghmeh and Mohammadi, Milad and Baledi, Danial and Rezvani, Zahra and Faili, Heshaam},
year={2025},
eprint={2505.18331},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CL},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18331}
}
📬 Contact
For collaboration or questions:
📧 Naghmeh Jamali – naghme.jamali.ai@gmail.com, Milad Mohammadi – miladmohammadi@ut.ac.ir, Danial Baledi – baledi.danial@gmail.com.