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.
arXiv:2608. 15691v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Health misinformation circulating during pandemics can gain traction rapidly, creating harmful narratives that compete with public health guidance.
arXiv:2607. 12336v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, while serving as a foundational enabler for modern social media and digital health services, exert a bivalent effect by simultaneously acting as a combatant against and a spread vector for misinformation.
The paper investigates why retrieval‑based open‑ended evaluation fails in medical fact verification. By creating two detailed taxonomies—one for retrieval‑stage errors across five quality dimensions and another for verifier‑reasoning errors across six steps—the authors automatically label evidence quality and reasoning errors using an LLM‑as‑Judge pipeline. Their large‑scale stress tests across multiple retrieval methods and verifier models show that increasing model size, reasoning effort, source breadth, or medical fine‑tuning does not eliminate these failure modes, indicating fundamental limits of the retrieve‑then‑verify paradigm in open‑ended medical contexts.
The paper investigates evidence generation for biomedical claim verification, evaluating various large language models and retrieval strategies on the CARE-XAI benchmark. It finds that fine‑tuned LLMs excel at producing evidence, while biomedical classifiers still lead in verdict‑only prediction. PubMed retrieval helps on PubMed‑aligned datasets but can mislead on broader public‑health claims, prompting the authors to propose Bio‑GRACE, a diagnostic that normalizes gold references to assess retrieval utility.
arXiv:2608. 16273v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foresight-England (Foresight-E) is the first national-scale generative foundation model of electronic health records (EHRs), developed as a research pilot strictly for COVID-19 research.
This paper introduces a multi‑branch fusion framework that combines transformer‑based semantics, rhetorical cues, stance representations, and psychologically motivated proxies to detect health misinformation and characterize its spread on online social networks. The authors propose an interpretable Cognitive Propagation Score (CPS) derived from text cues that estimate argument complexity, emotional intensity, and virality potential, aiding diffusion‑risk reasoning when engagement data are missing. Experiments on three benchmark datasets (Constraint, COVID‑19_FNIR, Monkeypox) demonstrate near‑perfect classification and ranking performance, with ablation studies showing complementary gains from psychological and rhetorical components.
R2VC is a modular fact‑checking system that separates retrieval, reasoning, verification, and confidence calibration. It uses hybrid sparse‑plus‑dense Wikipedia retrieval, a fine‑tuned generator for structured verdicts, an NLI cross‑encoder for selecting evidence‑based candidates, and a lightweight calibrator for confidence and abstention. On the FEVER benchmark, R2VC improves accuracy by 13.74% over a baseline and shows that verifier‑based candidate selection and calibration are key contributors to performance.
The article proposes a framework called quantitative evidence mining to transform biomedical findings into structured, context-rich evidence units. It outlines core elements such as claim, measured entity, value, comparator, population, conditions, temporal context, uncertainty, provenance, validation, and expert review. The authors present an eight-stage reference architecture and emphasize that plausibility should remain multidimensional rather than collapsed into a single truth label, linking extraction to evidence synthesis for applications like clinical trials, biomarker research, and knowledge-graph construction.
arXiv:2608.29617v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper introduces a hybrid fact-checking framework that integrates Knowledge Graph-based semantic memory with adversarial multi-agent reasoning f...
FakeSpotter is a new tool that estimates the viral misinformation risk of textual content by measuring structural fingerprints of misinformation instead of directly judging truthfulness. It operates across linguistic, narrative, logical, and critical‑thinking dimensions, using repeated large language model assessments and domain‑specific logistic regression classifiers for both short and long texts. In a labeled corpus of 764 texts, FakeSpotter achieved macro F1 scores of 0.788 for short texts and 0.793 for long texts, and its interpretive layer offers explainable outputs such as feature‑based scores, signal agreement, and a caution index for social listening.
arXiv:2608.30393v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Biomedical artificial intelligence (AI) systems increasingly extract, organize, and reuse scientific claims from literature, clinical trials, and regul...
This thesis explores how to select and adapt NLP models for global health literature when annotated data and computational resources are scarce. It compares skip‑gram word2vec models trained on increasingly large specialized corpora with BioWordVec for semantic tag discovery, finding that larger coverage does not always yield more useful domain associations. The study also evaluates convolutional spaCy models versus a RoBERTa transformer for named entity recognition, noting a trade‑off between higher F1 scores and longer inference time, and investigates MiniLM few‑shot versus BART‑MNLI zero‑shot classification for multi‑label topic classification, highlighting practical constraints of inference cost. "whyItMatters":"The work provides empirical guidance on balancing model accuracy and resource demands for building knowledge systems in low‑resource global health settings."