JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

With the rapidly accelerating spread of dissemination of false medical information on the Web, the task of establishing the credibility of online sources of medical information becomes a pressing necessity. The sheer number of websites offering questionable medical information presented as reliable and actionable suggestions with possibly harmful effects poses an additional requirement for potential solutions, as they have to scale to the size of the problem. Machine learning is one such solution which, when properly deployed, can be an effective tool in fighting medical disinformation on the Web.

Objective:

We present a comprehensive framework for designing and curating of machine learning training datasets for online medical information credibility assessment. We show how the annotation process should be constructed and what pitfalls should be avoided. Our main objective is to provide researchers from medical and computer science communities with guidelines on how to construct datasets for machine learning models for various areas of medical information wars.

Methods:

The key component of our approach is the active annotation process. We begin by outlining the annotation protocol for the curation of high-quality training dataset, which then can be augmented and rapidly extended by employing the human-in-the-loop paradigm to machine learning training. To circumvent the cold start problem of insufficient gold standard annotations, we propose a pre-processing pipeline consisting of representation learning, clustering, and re-ranking of sentences for the acceleration of the training process and the optimization of human resources involved in the annotation.

Results:

We collect over 10 000 annotations of sentences related to selected subjects (psychiatry, cholesterol, autism, antibiotics, vaccines, steroids, birth methods, food allergy testing) for less than $7 000 employing 9 highly qualified annotators (certified medical professionals) and we release this dataset to the general public. We develop an active annotation framework for more efficient annotation of non-credible medical statements. The results of the qualitative analysis support our claims of the efficacy of the presented method.

Conclusions:

A set of very diverse incentives is driving the widespread dissemination of medical disinformation on the Web. An effective strategy of countering this spread is to use machine learning for automatically establishing the credibility of online medical information. This, however, requires a thoughtful design of the training pipeline. In this paper we present a comprehensive framework of active annotation. In addition, we publish a large curated dataset of medical statements labelled as credible, non-credible, or neutral.