Scaling Arabic Medical Chatbots Using Synthetic Data: Enhancing Generative AI with Synthetic Patient Records

Abstract

The development of medical chatbots in Arabic is significantly constrained by the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality annotated datasets. While prior efforts compiled a dataset of 20,000 Arabic patient-doctor interactions from social media to fine-tune large language models (LLMs), model scalability and generalization remained limited. In this study, we propose a scalable synthetic data augmentation strategy to expand the training corpus to 100,000 records. Using advanced generative AI systems ChatGPT-4o and Gemini 2.5 Pro we generated 80,000 contextually relevant and medically coherent synthetic question-answer pairs grounded in the structure of the original dataset. These synthetic samples were semantically filtered, manually validated, and integrated into the training pipeline. We fine-tuned five LLMs, including Mistral-7B and AraGPT2, and evaluated their performance using BERTScore metrics and expert-driven qualitative assessments. To further analyze the effectiveness of synthetic sources, we conducted an ablation study comparing ChatGPT-4o and Gemini-generated data independently. The results showed that ChatGPT-4o data consistently led to higher F1-scores and fewer hallucinations across all models. Overall, our findings demonstrate the viability of synthetic augmentation as a practical solution for enhancing domain-specific language models in-low resource medical NLP, paving the way for more inclusive, scalable, and accurate Arabic healthcare chatbot systems.