arXiv · 2605.13292
IndicMedDialog: A Parallel Multi-Turn Medical Dialogue Dataset for Accessible Healthcare in Indic Languages
Abstract
Most existing medical dialogue systems operate in a single-turn question--answering paradigm or rely on template-based datasets, limiting conversational realism and multilingual applicability. We introduce IndicMedDialog, a parallel multi-turn medical dialogue dataset spanning English and nine Indic languages: Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. The dataset extends MDDial with LLM-generated synthetic consultations, translated using TranslateGemma, verified by native speakers, and refined through a script-aware post-processing pipeline to correct phonetic, lexical, and character-spacing errors. Building on this dataset, we fine-tune IndicMedLM via parameter-efficient adaptation of a quantized small language model, incorporating optional patient pre-context to personalise multi-turn symptom elicitation. We evaluate against zero-shot multilingual baselines, conduct systematic error analysis across ten languages, and validate clinical plausibility through medical expert evaluation.
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Shubham Kumar Nigam, Suparnojit Sarkar, Piyush Patel. 2026-05-13. IndicMedDialog: A Parallel Multi-Turn Medical Dialogue Dataset for Accessible Healthcare in Indic Languages. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13292
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