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An Empirical Assessment of the Qualitative Aspects of Misinformation in Health News

  • Stony Brook University

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

10 Scopus citations

Abstract

The explosion of online health news articles runs the risk of the proliferation of low-quality information. Within the existing work on fact-checking, however, relatively little attention has been paid to medical news. We present a health news classification task to determine whether medical news articles satisfy a set of review criteria deemed important by medical experts and health care journalists. We present a dataset of 1,119 health news paired with systematic reviews. The review criteria consist of six elements that are essential to the accuracy of medical news. We then present experiments comparing the classical token-based approach with the more recent transformer-based models. Our results show that detecting qualitative lapses is a challenging task with direct ramifications in misinformation, but is an important direction to pursue beyond assigning True or False labels to short claims.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationNLP4IF 2021 - NLP for Internet Freedom
Subtitle of host publicationCensorship, Disinformation, and Propaganda, Proceedings of the 4th Workshop
EditorsAnna Feldman, Giovanni Da San Martino, Chris Leberknight, Preslav Nakov
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages76-81
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9781954085268
DOIs
StatePublished - 2021
Event4th Workshop on NLP for Internet Freedom: Censorship, Disinformation, and Propaganda, NLP4IF 2021 - Virtual, Online
Duration: Jun 6 2021 → …

Publication series

NameNLP4IF 2021 - NLP for Internet Freedom: Censorship, Disinformation, and Propaganda, Proceedings of the 4th Workshop

Conference

Conference4th Workshop on NLP for Internet Freedom: Censorship, Disinformation, and Propaganda, NLP4IF 2021
CityVirtual, Online
Period06/6/21 → …

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