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MedFact: Towards Improving Veracity of Medical Information in Social Media using Applied Machine Learning

Full Text: CAI2018.pdf PDF

Since the advent of Web 2.0 and social media, anyone with an Internet connection can create content online, even if it is uncertain or fake information, which has attracted significant attention recently. In this study, we address the challenge of uncertain online health information by automating systematic approaches borrowed from evidence-based medicine. Our proposed algorithm, MedFact, enables recommendation of trusted medical information within healthrelated social media discussions and empowers online users to make informed decisions about the credibility of online health information. MedFact automatically extracts relevant keywords from online discussions and queries trusted medical literature with the aim of embedding related factual information into the discussion. Our retrieval model takes into account layperson terminology and hierarchy of evidence. Consequently, MedFact is a departure from current consensusbased approaches for determining credibility using “wisdom of the crowd”, binary “Like” votes and ratings, popular in social media. Moving away from subjective metrics, MedFact introduces objective metrics. We also present preliminary work towards a granular veracity score by using supervised machine learning to compare statements within uncertain social media text and trusted medical text. We evaluate our proposed algorithm on various data sets from existing health social media involving both patient and medic discussions, with promising results and suggestions for ongoing improvements and future research.

Citation

H. Samuel, O. Zaiane. "MedFact: Towards Improving Veracity of Medical Information in Social Media using Applied Machine Learning". Canadian Artificial Intelligence Conference, Toronto, Canada, May 2018.

Keywords:  
Category: In Conference
Web Links: Webdocs

BibTeX

@incollection{Samuel+Zaiane:18,
  author = {Hamman Samuel and Osmar R. Zaiane},
  title = {MedFact: Towards Improving Veracity of Medical Information in Social
    Media using Applied Machine Learning},
  booktitle = {Canadian Artificial Intelligence Conference},
  year = 2018,
}

Last Updated: November 03, 2019
Submitted by Sabina P

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