FMI@SU ToxHabits: Evaluating LLMs Performance on Toxic Habit Extraction in Spanish Clinical Texts

arXiv cs.CL / 4/9/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper evaluates how well LLMs can extract named entities related to toxic habits from Spanish clinical texts for the ToxHabits Shared Task (Subtask 1).
  • It tests multiple prompting strategies, including zero-shot, few-shot, and prompt optimization, to detect substance use/abuse mentions and classify them into Tobacco, Alcohol, Cannabis, and Drug.
  • The study finds that GPT-4.1 using few-shot prompting delivered the strongest performance among the explored LLM approaches.
  • The authors report an F1 score of 0.65 on the test set, indicating effective entity recognition in Spanish clinical language and suggesting cross-lingual potential beyond English.
  • Overall, the work provides an experimental benchmark and practical guidance for using LLM prompting to support clinical information extraction for substance-related content.

Abstract

The paper presents an approach for the recognition of toxic habits named entities in Spanish clinical texts. The approach was developed for the ToxHabits Shared Task. Our team participated in subtask 1, which aims to detect substance use and abuse mentions in clinical case reports and classify them in four categories (Tobacco, Alcohol, Cannabis, and Drug). We explored various methods of utilizing LLMs for the task, including zero-shot, few-shot, and prompt optimization, and found that GPT-4.1's few-shot prompting performed the best in our experiments. Our method achieved an F1 score of 0.65 on the test set, demonstrating a promising result for recognizing named entities in languages other than English.