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Evaluating Large Language Models for Medical Named Entity Recognition in Urdu: A Benchmark Study

Medical named entity recognition (NER) is a crucial task in natural language processing (NLP) for extracting meaningful entities such as diseases, symptoms, medications, body parts, and treatments from clinical text. However, NER in low-resource languages like Urdu remains underexplored due to limited annotated datasets. In this study, we evaluated the performance of two state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs), ChatGPT-4o and LLAMA 3.2, on Urdu medical NER using a dataset of 2,057 health-related Urdu news headlines manually annotated across five entity categories. Both models were evaluated using precision, recall, and F1-score. It was found that both models exhibited low precision and moderate recall. ChatGPT-4o achieved the highest F1 for Disease (0.35) while LLAMA 3.2 reached slightly lower F1 scores for Disease (0.33). Both models performed poorly on treatment-related terms, with F1 scores of 0.036 (LLAMA 3.2) and 0.011 (ChatGPT-4o). Micro-average F1-scores were 0.187 for ChatGPT-4o and 0.183 for LLAMA 3.2, indicating comparable overall performance. These findings highlight the challenges of medical NER in low-resource languages and underscore the need for domain-specific fine-tuning, transfer learning, few-shot learning, and prompt engineering to improve performance.