Sherry T. Tong
2026
MED-COREASONER: Reducing Language Disparities in Medical Reasoning via Language-Informed Co-Reasoning
Fan Gao | Sherry T. Tong | Jiwoong Sohn | Jiahao Huang | Junfeng Jiang | Ding Xia | Piyalitt Ittichaiwong | Kanyakorn Veerakanjana | Hyunjae Kim | Qingyu Chen | Edison Marrese-Taylor | Kazuma Kobayashi | Akiko Aizawa | Irene Li
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Fan Gao | Sherry T. Tong | Jiwoong Sohn | Jiahao Huang | Junfeng Jiang | Ding Xia | Piyalitt Ittichaiwong | Kanyakorn Veerakanjana | Hyunjae Kim | Qingyu Chen | Edison Marrese-Taylor | Kazuma Kobayashi | Akiko Aizawa | Irene Li
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
While reasoning-enhanced large language models perform strongly on English medical tasks, a persistent multilingual gap remains, with substantially weaker reasoning in local languages, limiting equitable global medical deployment. To bridge this gap, we introduce Med-CoReasoner, a language-informed co-reasoning framework that elicits parallel English and local-language reasoning, abstracts them into structured concepts, and integrates local clinical knowledge into an English logical scaffold via concept-level alignment and retrieval. This design combines the structural robustness of English reasoning with the practice-grounded expertise encoded in local languages. To evaluate multilingual medical reasoning beyond multiple-choice settings, we construct MultiMed-X, a benchmark covering seven languages with expert-annotated long-form question answering and natural language inference tasks, comprising 350 instances per language. Experiments across three benchmarks show that Med-CoReasoner improves multilingual reasoning performance by an average of 5%, with particularly substantial gains in low-resource languages. Moreover, model distillation and expert evaluation analysis further confirm that Med-CoReasoner produces clinically sound and culturally grounded reasoning traces.