Learning Trustworthy Web Sources to Derive Correct Answers and Reduce Health Misinformation in Search

Abstract

When searching the web for answers to health questions, people can make incorrect decisions that have a negative effect on their lives if the search results contain misinformation. To reduce health misinformation in search results, we need to be able to detect documents with correct answers and promote them over documents containing misinformation. Determining the correct answer has been a difficult hurdle to overcome for participants in the TREC Health Misinformation Track. In the 2021 track, automatic runs were not allowed to use the known answer to a topic’s health question, and as a result, the top automatic run had a compatibility-difference score of 0.043 while the top manual run, which used the known answer, had a score of 0.259. The compatibility-difference measures the ability of methods to rank correct and credible documents before incorrect and non-credible documents. By using an existing set of health questions and their known answers, we show it is possible to learn which web hosts are trustworthy, from which we can predict the correct answers to the 2021 health questions with an accuracy of 76%. Using our predicted answers, we can promote documents that we predict contain this answer and achieve a compatibility-difference score of 0.129, which is a three-fold increase in performance over the best previous automatic method.