Detecting Health Advice in Medical Research Literature

Yingya Li, Jun Wang, Bei Yu


Abstract
Health and medical researchers often give clinical and policy recommendations to inform health practice and public health policy. However, no current health information system supports the direct retrieval of health advice. This study fills the gap by developing and validating an NLP-based prediction model for identifying health advice in research publications. We annotated a corpus of 6,000 sentences extracted from structured abstracts in PubMed publications as ‘“strong advice”, “weak advice”, or “no advice”, and developed a BERT-based model that can predict, with a macro-averaged F1-score of 0.93, whether a sentence gives strong advice, weak advice, or not. The prediction model generalized well to sentences in both unstructured abstracts and discussion sections, where health advice normally appears. We also conducted a case study that applied this prediction model to retrieve specific health advice on COVID-19 treatments from LitCovid, a large COVID research literature portal, demonstrating the usefulness of retrieving health advice sentences as an advanced research literature navigation function for health researchers and the general public.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.486
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6018–6029
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.486
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.486
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yingya Li, Jun Wang, and Bei Yu. 2021. Detecting Health Advice in Medical Research Literature. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 6018–6029, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Detecting Health Advice in Medical Research Literature (Li et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.486.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.486.mp4
Code
 junwang4/detecting-health-advice