SOAPTriage: SOAP-Guided Multi-View Clinical Text Modeling Framework for Automated ESI Prediction

Enming Wang, Jianlei Wang, Xueping Peng, Hongjiao Guan, Yinglong Wang, Sibo Wei, Jianbin Guo, Ruifeng Xu, Wenpeng Lu


Abstract
Emergency departments (ED) rely on the Emergency Severity Index (ESI) to assess patient acuity and prioritize care, a process that is largely driven by clinical triage text. Despite recent progress in automated ESI prediction, two fundamental challenges remain: the scarcity of high-quality triage text data due to privacy and regulatory constraints and the lack of a clinically grounded triage framework capable of explicitly capturing the multidimensional structure of triage reasoning. To address these challenges, we draw inspiration from the clinically grounded SOAP paradigm, in which SOAP refers to Subjective, Objective, Assessment, and Plan and captures four complementary aspects of clinical reasoning. Building on this paradigm, we propose SOAPTriage, a SOAP-guided multi-view clinical text modeling framework for automated ESI prediction. To mitigate data scarcity, SOAPTriage introduces a Clinical Note Augmentation (CNA) module that generates natural-language triage notes from structured ED records, resulting in 15,393 augmented clinical notes derived from a real-world dataset. To incorporate clinical structure, SOAPTriage employs a SOAP-Guided Encoding (SGE) module that models patient conditions from four complementary SOAP perspectives, together with an adaptive SOAP-Aware Aggregation and Inference (SAAI) module that performs multi-view reasoning to infer ESI levels. Extensive experiments show that SOAPTriage consistently outperforms strong prompting-based, multi-agent, and encoder-based baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of SOAP-guided multi-view clinical text modeling for automated emergency triage.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.1608
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
34813–34837
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1608/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Enming Wang, Jianlei Wang, Xueping Peng, Hongjiao Guan, Yinglong Wang, Sibo Wei, Jianbin Guo, Ruifeng Xu, and Wenpeng Lu. 2026. SOAPTriage: SOAP-Guided Multi-View Clinical Text Modeling Framework for Automated ESI Prediction. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 34813–34837, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SOAPTriage: SOAP-Guided Multi-View Clinical Text Modeling Framework for Automated ESI Prediction (Wang et al., ACL 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1608.pdf
Checklist:
 2026.acl-long.1608.checklist.pdf