Advancing Biomedical Claim Verification by Using Large Language Models with Better Structured Prompting Strategies

Siting Liang, Daniel Sonntag


Abstract
In this work, we propose a structured four-step prompting strategy that explicitly guides large language models (LLMs) through (1) claim comprehension, (2) evidence analysis, (3) intermediate conclusion, and (4) entailment decision-making to improve the accuracy of biomedical claim verification. This strategy leverages compositional and human-like reasoning to enhance logical consistency and factual grounding to reduce reliance on memorizing few-Shot exemplars and help LLMs generalize reasoning patterns across different biomedical claim verification tasks. Through extensive evaluation on biomedical NLI benchmarks, we analyze the individual contributions of each reasoning step. Our findings demonstrate that comprehension, evidence analysis, and intermediate conclusion each play distinct yet complementary roles. Systematic prompting and carefully designed step-wise instructions not only unlock the latent cognitive abilities of LLMs but also enhance interpretability by making it easier to trace errors and understand the model’s reasoning process. Our research aims to improve the reliability of AI-driven biomedical claim verification.
Anthology ID:
2025.bionlp-1.14
Volume:
ACL 2025
Month:
August
Year:
2025
Address:
Viena, Austria
Editors:
Dina Demner-Fushman, Sophia Ananiadou, Makoto Miwa, Junichi Tsujii
Venues:
BioNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
148–166
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/acl25-workshop-ingestion/2025.bionlp-1.14/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Siting Liang and Daniel Sonntag. 2025. Advancing Biomedical Claim Verification by Using Large Language Models with Better Structured Prompting Strategies. In ACL 2025, pages 148–166, Viena, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Advancing Biomedical Claim Verification by Using Large Language Models with Better Structured Prompting Strategies (Liang & Sonntag, BioNLP 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/acl25-workshop-ingestion/2025.bionlp-1.14.pdf
Supplementarymaterial:
 2025.bionlp-1.14.SupplementaryMaterial.txt