# AraHealthQA 2025: The First Shared Task on Arabic Health Question Answering

## TL;DR

AraHealthQA 2025 is the first shared task focused on Arabic health question answering, aiming to improve resources and benchmarking for medical QA in Arabic across mental health and broader medical domains.

## Contribution

This work introduces a comprehensive shared task with datasets, evaluation metrics, and baseline systems to advance Arabic medical QA research and address resource scarcity.

## Key findings

- Baseline systems achieved moderate performance levels.
- Participation included diverse research teams and approaches.
- The task revealed challenges in multilingual and culturally nuanced healthcare QA.

## Abstract

We introduce AraHealthQA 2025, the Comprehensive Arabic Health Question Answering Shared Task, held in conjunction with ArabicNLP 2025 (co-located with EMNLP 2025). This shared task addresses the paucity of high-quality Arabic medical QA resources by offering two complementary tracks: MentalQA, focusing on Arabic mental health Q&A (e.g., anxiety, depression, stigma reduction), and MedArabiQ, covering broader medical domains such as internal medicine, pediatrics, and clinical decision making. Each track comprises multiple subtasks, evaluation datasets, and standardized metrics, facilitating fair benchmarking. The task was structured to promote modeling under realistic, multilingual, and culturally nuanced healthcare contexts. We outline the dataset creation, task design and evaluation framework, participation statistics, baseline systems, and summarize the overall outcomes. We conclude with reflections on the performance trends observed and prospects for future iterations in Arabic health QA.