Brown CS News

Brown CS PhD student Tassallah Amina Abdullahi has received the Best Social Impact Paper award at the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), one of the premier international conferences in natural language processing. Her paper, "AfriMed-QA: A Pan-African, Multi-Specialty, Medical Question-Answering Benchmark Dataset", was co-written with several colleagues from institutions such as Georgia Tech, Ohio State University, Masakhane, Kenyatta University, McGill University, and Google Research.

The winning work explores how generative AI systems can be developed and deployed responsibly in healthcare contexts where access to medical expertise is limited. Tassallah and her co-authors evaluate diagnostic support systems in under-resourced environments, highlighting both the promise and the pitfalls of relying on large language models in clinical care. Their findings show that with careful alignment and robust evaluation frameworks, AI tools can meaningfully improve equity of access to high-quality medical guidance. 

“It’s incredibly rewarding to see research that began as an idea now helping pave the way for more equitable access for communities where access to medical expertise has long been out of reach,” says Tassallah.

Her broader research focuses on developing and evaluating AI systems for healthcare, spanning generative AI for diagnosis, retrieval-augmented decision support, medical speech recognition, and climate-aware outbreak prediction. In particular, Tassallah emphasizes low-resource settings: she builds benchmark datasets for healthcare in low- and middle-income countries and works to ensure that AI systems are not only accurate but also safe, aligned with real-world practice, and clinically impactful.

Reflecting on the honor, Tassallah notes the collaborative spirit behind the work: “This paper represents not just technical progress, but a step toward ensuring that innovations in AI truly serve those who need them most.”

For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communications Manager Jesse C. Polhemus.