Patient-generated symptom expressions are linguistically diverse, often deviating from standardized medical terminology. This paper introduces the Japanese Patient Phrase Bank (JPPB), the first automatically constructed phrase-level normalization resource for Japanese patient language. JPPB introduces an embedding-based soft labeling framework that transforms traditional one-to-one dictionary mappings into graded and ambiguity-aware associations. This framework represents a shift from word-level to phrase-level normalization in Japanese. The resource covers 7,035 phrase–term pairs across 412 symptoms. Evaluation on the KEEPHA and MedNLP-SC datasets shows that soft labels consistently improve Top-1 accuracy and better approximate gold label distributions compared with hard labels. While LLM-based normalization achieved the highest scores, JPPB provides a lightweight and transparent alternative suitable for local deployment. This work demonstrates that large-scale, automatically generated phrase banks can achieve competitive performance relative to manually curated resources and serve as practical, scalable resources for medical natural language processing in Japanese.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have accelerated the NLP applications in the medical and clinical domains. However, evaluations remain limited for non-English languages, such as Japanese, where clinical corpora are particularly scarce. To address this gap, we present J-ClinicalBench, a publicly available benchmark designed to reflect realistic Japanese clinical tasks. We first created 227 expert-authored clinical documents and newly constructed five datasets for core clinical tasks. Building on these datasets, J-ClinicalBench comprises nine clinical tasks spanning clinical language reasoning, generation, and understanding. We establish baseline performance on J-ClinicalBench by evaluating state-of-the-art proprietary and Japanese open-source LLMs, providing the first assessment of their utility in practical clinical scenarios. By releasing this benchmark, we aim to foster the development and evaluation of clinically applicable LLMs in Japanese healthcare, bridging the current gap between clinical NLP research and clinical practice.

User-generated data sources have gained significance in uncovering Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs), with an increasing number of discussions occurring in the digital world. However, the existing clinical corpora predominantly revolve around scientific articles in English. This work presents a multilingual corpus of texts concerning ADRs gathered from diverse sources, including patient fora, social media, and clinical reports in German, French, and Japanese. Our corpus contains annotations covering 12 entity types, four attribute types, and 13 relation types. It contributes to the development of real-world multilingual language models for healthcare. We provide statistics to highlight certain challenges associated with the corpus and conduct preliminary experiments resulting in strong baselines for extracting entities and relations between these entities, both within and across languages.

Since medical text cannot be shared easily due to privacy concerns, synthetic data bears much potential for natural language processing applications. In the context of social media and user-generated messages about drug intake and adverse drug effects, this work presents different methods to examine the authenticity of synthetic text. We conclude that the generated tweets are untraceable and show enough authenticity from the medical point of view to be used as a replacement for a real Twitter corpus. However, original data might still be the preferred choice as they contain much more diversity.