OEMA: Ontology-Enhanced Multi-Agent Collaboration Framework for Zero-Shot Clinical Named Entity Recognition

Abstract: Clinical named entity recognition (NER) is crucial for extracting information from electronic health records (EHRs), but supervised models like CRF and BioClinicalBERT require costly annotated data. While zero-shot NER with LLMs reduces this dependency, it struggles with example selection granularity and integrating prompts with self-improvement. To address this, we propose OEMA, a zero-shot clinical NER framework using multi-agent collaboration. OEMA's three components are: a self-annotator generating examples, a discriminator filtering them via SNOMED CT, and a predictor using entity descriptions for accurate inference. On MTSamples and VAERS datasets, OEMA achieves state-of-the-art exact-match performance. Under related-match, it matches supervised BioClinicalBERT and surpasses CRF. OEMA addresses key zero-shot NER challenges through ontology-guided reasoning and multi-agent collaboration, achieving near-supervised performance and showing promise for clinical NLP applications.