@inproceedings{tao-etal-2026-caspar,
    title = "{CASPAR}: A Context-Aware Span Refinement Approach for Decision Support",
    author = "Tao, Jing  and
      Eskandari, Amir  and
      Zulkernine, Farhana",
    editor = "Gupta, Deepak  and
      Demner-Fushman, Dina",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the {B}io{NLP} 2026 (Shared Tasks)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.bionlp-2.21/",
    pages = "146--154",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-435-4",
    abstract = "This paper presents CASPAR, a two-stage approach for the MedExACT shared task on medical decision span extraction and classification from ICU discharge summaries. Stage 1 performs document-level sequence labeling using a sliding-window RoBERTa encoder with BiGRU and CRF to generate candidate spans. Stage 2 applies a lightweight refinement module that revisits each candidate within its surrounding context to revise category assignments and correct span boundaries. The system achieves a final score of 0.5668 on the official leaderboard, substantially outperforming the organizer baseline on span-level F1. In addition to system description, we provides ablation results, repeated-run validation statistics, and subgroup- and error-level analyses that highlight the challenges of exact boundary recovery and confusion in race categories subgroups in clinical decision extraction."
}