用权威医学证据验证健康谣言,适配非洲本地场景
An Evidence-Grounded Retrieval-Augmented Transformer Framework for Health Misinformation Verification

- 结合检索与Transformer模型,从世卫和尼日利亚疾控中心获取证据
- 在67条真实谣言上达到71%准确率,权重F1为0.66
- 为资源有限地区提供可落地的谣言核查框架
数字平台中虚假健康信息的快速传播已成为重大公共健康挑战,尤其在传染病暴发期间,延迟验证会影响公众行为并阻碍疾病控制。尽管自动化健康谣言检测取得进展,但现有方法多依赖全球生物医学资源,难以捕捉发展中国家的本地语境。本研究提出一种检索增强型Transformer框架,利用世界卫生组织和尼日利亚疾病控制中心的可信证据验证健康声明。该框架结合语义证据检索与Transformer分类,判断声明是否为真、假或误导。为评估方法,从尼日利亚事实核查源整理出67条经验证的健康声明数据集,涵盖新冠、拉沙热、霍乱、麻疹和猴痘。评估了三种Transformer模型及检索增强配置。双向编码器表示(BERT)表现最佳,准确率为71%,加权F1得分为0.66。尽管检索增强未提升性能,因当前证据库规模和覆盖有限,但结果凸显全面权威知识源对可靠谣言验证的重要性。该框架为尼日利亚及其他资源受限地区提供了可扩展的上下文感知、证据驱动的谣言核查基础。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The rapid spread of false and misleading health information through digital platforms has become a major public health challenge, particularly during infectious disease outbreaks where delayed verification can influence public behaviour and hinder effective disease control. Although recent advances in automated health misinformation detection have shown encouraging results, most existing approaches rely heavily on global biomedical resources and often fail to capture the local context needed to verify claims in developing countries. This study presents a retrieval-augmented transformer framework designed to verify health-related claims using trusted evidence from the World Health Organization and the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. The framework combines semantic evidence retrieval with transformer-based classification to determine whether a claim is true, false, or misleading. To evaluate the proposed approach, a manually annotated dataset of 67 verified health claims covering coronavirus disease, Lassa fever, cholera, measles, and monkeypox was compiled from Nigerian fact-checking sources. Three transformer models and a retrieval-augmented configuration were evaluated. The Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers model achieved the best performance, with an accuracy of 71% and a weighted F1-score of 0.66. Although retrieval augmentation did not improve classification performance because the current evidence repository was limited in size and coverage, the findings highlight the importance of comprehensive and authoritative knowledge sources for reliable health misinformation verification. The proposed framework provides a practical foundation for developing context-aware and evidence-driven health misinformation verification systems for Nigeria and other resource-constrained settings.
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