TORONTO: Indian Man In Canada Develops Web System To Limit Covid Misinformation

TORONTO: A team led by an Indian-origin
researcher in Canada has developed a new system that increases the correctness
and reliability of online health-related searches by 80 per cent to help people
make better decisions about topics such as COVID-19.

The team
at the University of Waterloo in Canada noted that the internet search engines
are the most common tools the public uses to look for facts about COVID-19 and
its effect on their health.

A
proliferation of misinformation can have real consequences, so the team created
a way to make these searches more reliable.

“With
so much new information coming out all the time, it can be challenging for
people to know what is true and what is not,” said Ronak Pradeep, a PhD student
in the Cheriton School of Computer Science at Waterloo and lead author of a
study.

“But
the consequences of misinformation can be pretty bad, like people going out and
buying medicines or using home remedies that can hurt them,” Mr Pradeep said.

The
researchers said even the big search engines that host billions of searches
every day can not keep up since there has been so much scientific data and
research on COVID-19 in such a short time.

“Most
of the systems are trained on well-curated data, so they don’t always know how
to differentiate between an article promoting drinking bleach to prevent
COVID-19 as opposed to real health information,” Mr Pradeep said.

“Our
goal is to help people see the right articles and get the right information so they
can make better decisions in general with things like COVID,” he added.

Mr
Pradeep said the project aims to refine internet search programmes to promote
the best health information for users.

The team
has leveraged its two-stage neural reranking architecture for search which they
augmented with a label prediction system trained to discern correct from
dubious and incorrect information.

The
system links with a search protocol that relies on data from the World Health
Organization (WHO) and verified information as the basis for ranking, promoting
and sometimes even excluding online articles.

“Our
design can potentially improve consumer health search to combat misinformation,
a challenge recently amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic,” the authors of
the study wrote.

Mr
Pradeep and other authors Xueguang Ma, Rodrigo Nogueira and Jimmy Lin, from the
University of Waterloo, presented a paper on the preliminary findings of the
system at SIGIR “21, a conference on research and development in
information retrieval, held between July 11-15 online.”