Combining Evidence and Reasoning for Biomedical Fact-Checking

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Barone, Mariano, Romano, Antonio, Riccio, Giuseppe, Postiglione, Marco, Moscato, Vincenzo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Barone, Mariano
Romano, Antonio
Riccio, Giuseppe
Postiglione, Marco
Moscato, Vincenzo
author_facet Barone, Mariano
Romano, Antonio
Riccio, Giuseppe
Postiglione, Marco
Moscato, Vincenzo
contents Misinformation in healthcare, from vaccine hesitancy to unproven treatments, poses risks to public health and trust in medical systems. While machine learning and natural language processing have advanced automated fact-checking, validating biomedical claims remains uniquely challenging due to complex terminology, the need for domain expertise, and the critical importance of grounding in scientific evidence. We introduce CER (Combining Evidence and Reasoning), a novel framework for biomedical fact-checking that integrates scientific evidence retrieval, reasoning via large language models, and supervised veracity prediction. By integrating the text-generation capabilities of large language models with advanced retrieval techniques for high-quality biomedical scientific evidence, CER effectively mitigates the risk of hallucinations, ensuring that generated outputs are grounded in verifiable, evidence-based sources. Evaluations on expert-annotated datasets (HealthFC, BioASQ-7b, SciFact) demonstrate state-of-the-art performance and promising cross-dataset generalization. Code and data are released for transparency and reproducibility: https: //github.com/PRAISELab-PicusLab/CER.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_13879
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Combining Evidence and Reasoning for Biomedical Fact-Checking
Barone, Mariano
Romano, Antonio
Riccio, Giuseppe
Postiglione, Marco
Moscato, Vincenzo
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
Misinformation in healthcare, from vaccine hesitancy to unproven treatments, poses risks to public health and trust in medical systems. While machine learning and natural language processing have advanced automated fact-checking, validating biomedical claims remains uniquely challenging due to complex terminology, the need for domain expertise, and the critical importance of grounding in scientific evidence. We introduce CER (Combining Evidence and Reasoning), a novel framework for biomedical fact-checking that integrates scientific evidence retrieval, reasoning via large language models, and supervised veracity prediction. By integrating the text-generation capabilities of large language models with advanced retrieval techniques for high-quality biomedical scientific evidence, CER effectively mitigates the risk of hallucinations, ensuring that generated outputs are grounded in verifiable, evidence-based sources. Evaluations on expert-annotated datasets (HealthFC, BioASQ-7b, SciFact) demonstrate state-of-the-art performance and promising cross-dataset generalization. Code and data are released for transparency and reproducibility: https: //github.com/PRAISELab-PicusLab/CER.
title Combining Evidence and Reasoning for Biomedical Fact-Checking
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13879