Identifying and Aligning Medical Claims Made on Social Media with Medical Evidence

Anthony James Hughes, Xingyi Song


Abstract
Evidence-based medicine is the practise of making medical decisions that adhere to the latest, and best known evidence at that time. Currently, the best evidence is often found in the form of documents, such as randomized control trials, meta-analyses and systematic reviews. This research focuses on aligning medical claims made on social media platforms with this medical evidence. By doing so, individuals without medical expertise can more effectively assess the veracity of such medical claims. We study three core tasks: identifying medical claims, extracting medical vocabulary from these claims, and retrieving evidence relevant to those identified medical claims. We propose a novel system that can generate synthetic medical claims to aid each of these core tasks. We additionally introduce a novel dataset produced by our synthetic generator that, when applied to these tasks, demonstrates not only a more flexible and holistic approach, but also an improvement in all comparable metrics. We make our dataset, the Expansive Medical Claim Corpus (EMCC), available at https://zenodo.org/records/8321460.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.753
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
8580–8593
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.753
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anthony James Hughes and Xingyi Song. 2024. Identifying and Aligning Medical Claims Made on Social Media with Medical Evidence. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 8580–8593, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Identifying and Aligning Medical Claims Made on Social Media with Medical Evidence (Hughes & Song, LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.753.pdf