What Makes Medical Claims (Un)Verifiable? Analyzing Entity and Relation Properties for Fact Verification

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Main Authors: Wührl, Amelie, Resendiz, Yarik Menchaca, Grimminger, Lara, Klinger, Roman
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Wührl, Amelie
Resendiz, Yarik Menchaca
Grimminger, Lara
Klinger, Roman
author_facet Wührl, Amelie
Resendiz, Yarik Menchaca
Grimminger, Lara
Klinger, Roman
contents Biomedical claim verification fails if no evidence can be discovered. In these cases, the fact-checking verdict remains unknown and the claim is unverifiable. To improve upon this, 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 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~(.82\F), whereas identifying unverifiable claims proves more challenging (.27\F). The dataset is available at http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/data/bioclaim.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_01360
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle What Makes Medical Claims (Un)Verifiable? Analyzing Entity and Relation Properties for Fact Verification
Wührl, Amelie
Resendiz, Yarik Menchaca
Grimminger, Lara
Klinger, Roman
Computation and Language
Biomedical claim verification fails if no evidence can be discovered. In these cases, the fact-checking verdict remains unknown and the claim is unverifiable. To improve upon this, 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 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~(.82\F), whereas identifying unverifiable claims proves more challenging (.27\F). The dataset is available at http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/data/bioclaim.
title What Makes Medical Claims (Un)Verifiable? Analyzing Entity and Relation Properties for Fact Verification
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.01360