Transformer-Based Tool for Automated Fact-Checking of Online Health Information: Development Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Many people seek health-related information online. The significance of reliable information became particularly evident due to the potential dangers of misinformation. Therefore, discerning true and reliable information from false information has become increasingly challenging. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to present a pilot study in which we introduced a novel approach to automate the fact-checking process, leveraging PubMed resources as a source of truth using natural language processing transformer models to enhance the process. METHODS: A total of 538 health-related web pages, covering 7 different disease subjects, were manually selected by Factually Health Company. The process included the following steps: (1) using transformer models of bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT), BioBERT, and SciBERT, and traditional models of random forests and support vector machines, to classify the contents of web pages into 3 thematic categories (semiology, epidemiology, and management), (2) for each category in the web pages, a PubMed query was automatically produced using a combination of the "WellcomeBertMesh" and "KeyBERT" models, (3) top 20 related literatures were automatically extracted from PubMed, and finally, (4) the similarity checking techniques of cosine similarity and Jaccard distance were applied to compare the content of extracted literature and web pages. RESULTS: -score for management. For each of the 3 categories in a web page, 1 PubMed query was generated and with each query, the 20 most related, open access articles within the category of systematic reviews and meta-analyses were extracted. Less than 10% of the extracted literature was irrelevant; those were deleted. For each web page, an average of 23% of the sentences were found to be very similar to the literature. Moreover, during the evaluation, it was found that cosine similarity outperformed the Jaccard distance measure when comparing the similarity between sentences from web pages and academic papers vectorized by BERT. However, there was a significant issue with false positives in the retrieved sentences when compared with accurate similarities, as some sentences had a similarity score exceeding 80%, but they could not be considered similar sentences. CONCLUSIONS: In this pilot study, we have proposed an approach to automate the fact-checking of health-related online information. Incorporating content from PubMed or other scientific article databases as trustworthy resources can automate the discovery of similarly credible information in the health domain.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".