Implicit Geographic Inference in LLM Medical Triage: Language-Driven Disparities in Emergency Recommendations
We investigate whether large language models produce different medical triage recommendations for identical symptoms based solely on the language of the patient prompt. Using Gemini 3.5 Flash, we evaluate a neurological symptom profile (persistent headache, blurred vision, nausea) across six languages (English, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, Arabic) with 30 runs per condition (n=450 total API calls). We find that the model recommends emergency room visits at rates ranging from 0% (Japanese, Hindi) to 30% (English, Arabic), despite assigning nearly identical severity scores (7.7-8.0/10) across all languages. Adding a single sentence specifying the patient's US location increases ER rec...
| Authors | Qi Han Wong |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 31 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 31 May 2026 |
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