HRDE: Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models for Chinese Health Rumor Detection and Explainability

TL;DR

This paper introduces HRDE, a retrieval-augmented large language model for Chinese health rumor detection and explainability, utilizing the largest Chinese health rumor dataset to improve accuracy and provide explanations.

Contribution

The paper constructs the largest Chinese health rumor dataset (HealthRCN) and proposes HRDE, a retrieval-augmented model that enhances rumor detection and explainability.

Findings

HRDE achieves 91.04% accuracy in rumor detection.

HRDE outperforms GPT-4-1106-Preview in accuracy and answer quality.

HealthRCN is the largest Chinese health rumor dataset to date.

Abstract

As people increasingly prioritize their health, the speed and breadth of health information dissemination on the internet have also grown. At the same time, the presence of false health information (health rumors) intermingled with genuine content poses a significant potential threat to public health. However, current research on Chinese health rumors still lacks a large-scale, public, and open-source dataset of health rumor information, as well as effective and reliable rumor detection methods. This paper addresses this gap by constructing a dataset containing 1.12 million health-related rumors (HealthRCN) through web scraping of common health-related questions and a series of data processing steps. HealthRCN is the largest known dataset of Chinese health information rumors to date. Based on this dataset, we propose retrieval-augmented large language models for Chinese health rumor detection and explainability (HRDE). This model leverages retrieved relevant information to accurately determine whether the input health information is a rumor and provides explanatory responses, effectively aiding users in verifying the authenticity of health information. In evaluation experiments, we compared multiple models and found that HRDE outperformed them all, including GPT-4-1106-Preview, in rumor detection accuracy and answer quality. HRDE achieved an average accuracy of 91.04% and an F1 score of 91.58%.