Verifying biomedical claims fails if no evidence can be discovered. In these cases, the fact-checking verdict remains unknown and the claim is unverifiable. To improve this situation, we have to understand if there are any claim properties that impact its verifiability. In this work we assume that entities and relations define the core variables in a biomedical claim’s anatomy and analyze if their properties help us to differentiate verifiable from unverifiable claims. In a study with trained annotation experts we prompt them to find evidence for biomedical claims, and observe how they refine search queries for their evidence search. This leads to the first corpus for scientific fact verification annotated with subject–relation–object triplets, evidence documents, and fact-checking verdicts (the BEAR-FACT corpus). We find (1) that discovering evidence for negated claims (e.g., X–does-not-cause–Y) is particularly challenging. Further, we see that annotators process queries mostly by adding constraints to the search and by normalizing entities to canonical names. (2) We compare our in-house annotations with a small crowdsourcing setting where we employ both medical experts and laypeople. We find that domain expertise does not have a substantial effect on the reliability of annotations. Finally, (3), we demonstrate that it is possible to reliably estimate the success of evidence retrieval purely from the claim text (.82F₁), whereas identifying unverifiable claims proves more challenging (.27F₁)

Many individuals affected by Social Anxiety Disorder turn to social media platforms to share their experiences and seek advice. This includes discussing the potential benefits of engaging with outdoor environments. As part of #SMM4H 2024, Shared Task 3 focuses on classifying the effects of outdoor spaces on social anxiety symptoms in Reddit posts. In our contribution to the task, we explore the effectiveness of domain-specific models (trained on social media data – SocBERT) against general domain models (trained on diverse datasets – BERT, RoBERTa, GPT-3.5) in predicting the sentiment related to outdoor spaces. Further, we assess the benefits of augmenting sparse human-labeled data with synthetic training instances and evaluate the complementary strengths of domain-specific and general classifiers using an ensemble model. Our results show that (1) fine-tuning small, domain-specific models generally outperforms large general language models in most cases. Only one large language model (GPT-4) exhibits performance comparable to the fine-tuned models (52% F1). Further, we find that (2) synthetic data does improve the performance of fine-tuned models in some cases, and (3) models do not appear to complement each other in our ensemble setup.

Models for affective text generation have shown a remarkable progress, but they commonly rely only on basic emotion theories or valance/arousal values as conditions. This is appropriate when the goal is to create explicit emotion statements (“The kid is happy.”). Emotions are, however, commonly communicated implicitly. For instance, the emotional interpretation of an event (“Their dog died.”) does often not require an explicit emotion statement. In psychology, appraisal theories explain the link between a cognitive evaluation of an event and the potentially developed emotion. They put the assessment of the situation on the spot, for instance regarding the own control or the responsibility for what happens. We hypothesize and subsequently show that including appraisal variables as conditions in a generation framework comes with two advantages. (1) The generation model is informed in greater detail about what makes a specific emotion and what properties it has. This leads to text generation that better fulfills the condition. (2) The variables of appraisal allow a user to perform a more fine-grained control of the generated text, by stating properties of a situation instead of only providing the emotion category. Our Bart and T5-based experiments with 7 emotions (Anger, Disgust, Fear, Guilt, Joy, Sadness, Shame), and 7 appraisals (Attention, Responsibility, Control, Circumstance, Pleasantness, Effort, Certainty) show that (1) adding appraisals during training improves the accurateness of the generated texts by 10 pp in F1. Further, (2) the texts with appraisal variables are longer and contain more details. This exemplifies the greater control for users.

Conditional natural language generation methods often require either expensive fine-tuning or training a large language model from scratch. Both are unlikely to lead to good results without a substantial amount of data and computational resources. Prompt learning without changing the parameters of a large language model presents a promising alternative. It is a cost-effective approach, while still achieving competitive results. While this procedure is now established for zero- and few-shot text classification and structured prediction, it has received limited attention in conditional text generation. We present the first automatic prompt optimization approach for emotion-conditioned text generation with instruction-fine-tuned models. Our method uses an iterative optimization procedure that changes the prompt by adding, removing, or replacing tokens. As objective function, we only require a text classifier that measures the realization of the conditional variable in the generated text. We evaluate the method on emotion-conditioned text generation with a focus on event reports and compare it to manually designed prompts that also act as the seed for the optimization procedure. The optimized prompts achieve 0.75 macro-average F1 to fulfill the emotion condition in contrast to manually designed seed prompts with only 0.22 macro-average F1.