Identifying Checkworthy CURE Claims on Twitter

Medical claims on social media, if left unchecked, have the potential to directly affect the well-being of consumers of online health information. However, existing studies on claim detection do not specifically focus on medical cure aspects, neither do they address if a cure claim is “checkworthy", an indicator of whether a claim is potentially beneficial or harmful, if unchecked. In this paper, we address these limitations by compiling CW-CURE, a novel dataset of CURE tweets, namely tweets containing claims on prevention, diagnoses, risks, treatments, and cures of medical conditions. CW-CURE contains tweets on four major health conditions, namely, Alzheimer’s disease, Cancer, Diabetes, and Depression annotated for claims, their “checkworthiness", as well as the different types of claims such as quantitative claim, correlation/causation, personal experience, and future prediction. We describe our processing pipeline for compiling CW-CURE and present classification results on CURE tweets using transformer-based models. In particular, we harness claim-type information obtained with zero-shot learning to show significant improvements in checkworthiness identification. Through CW-CURE, we hope to enable research on models for effective identification and flagging of impactful CURE content, to safeguard the public’s consumption of medical content online.