From Claim to Evidence: Verifying Chinese Health Claims with Medical Literature

Ensuring the accuracy of health claims in media is vital for public well-being, and evidence-based claim verification is critical in achieving this goal. However, identifying relevant biomedical literature as evidence for health claims is particularly challenging, especially within cross-genre and cross-lingual contexts. We propose an ad hoc information retrieval (IR) task to identify support for Chinese health claims obtained from Chinese news sources. We demonstrate the feasibility of such a task by presenting experiments on a novel dataset of pairs of Chinese health claims and English biomedical literature. We describe a two-step methodology comprising (i) a selection of the most relevant candidates from 764K research papers, and (ii) a final re-ranking of this selection. Our comprehensive experimental research demonstrates that incorporating domain-specific information significantly enhances retrieval accuracy and claim verification efficacy. This strategy is a major step toward improving the credibility of public health information dissemination and reducing the prevalence of falsehoods in health journalism.