An Entity-based Claim Extraction Pipeline for Real-world Biomedical Fact-checking

Amelie Wuehrl, Lara Grimminger, Roman Klinger


Abstract
Existing fact-checking models for biomedical claims are typically trained on synthetic or well-worded data and hardly transfer to social media content. This mismatch can be mitigated by adapting the social media input to mimic the focused nature of common training claims. To do so, Wührl and Klinger (2022a) propose to extract concise claims based on medical entities in the text. However, their study has two limitations: First, it relies on gold-annotated entities. Therefore, its feasibility for a real-world application cannot be assessed since this requires detecting relevant entities automatically. Second, they represent claim entities with the original tokens. This constitutes a terminology mismatch which potentially limits the fact-checking performance. To understand both challenges, we propose a claim extraction pipeline for medical tweets that incorporates named entity recognition and terminology normalization via entity linking. We show that automatic NER does lead to a performance drop in comparison to using gold annotations but the fact-checking performance still improves considerably over inputting the unchanged tweets. Normalizing entities to their canonical forms does, however, not improve the performance.
Anthology ID:
2023.fever-1.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth Fact Extraction and VERification Workshop (FEVER)
Month:
May
Year:
2023
Address:
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Editors:
Mubashara Akhtar, Rami Aly, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Oana Cocarascu, Zhijiang Guo, Arpit Mittal, Michael Schlichtkrull, James Thorne, Andreas Vlachos
Venue:
FEVER
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
29–37
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.fever-1.3
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.fever-1.3
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Amelie Wuehrl, Lara Grimminger, and Roman Klinger. 2023. An Entity-based Claim Extraction Pipeline for Real-world Biomedical Fact-checking. In Proceedings of the Sixth Fact Extraction and VERification Workshop (FEVER), pages 29–37, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
An Entity-based Claim Extraction Pipeline for Real-world Biomedical Fact-checking (Wuehrl et al., FEVER 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.fever-1.3.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.fever-1.3.mp4