Detecting Contradictory COVID-19 Drug Efficacy Claims from Biomedical Literature

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic created a deluge of questionable and contradictory scientific claims about drug efficacy -- an "infodemic" with lasting consequences for science and society. In this work, we argue that NLP models can help domain experts distill and understand the literature in this complex, high-stakes area. Our task is to automatically identify contradictory claims about COVID-19 drug efficacy. We frame this as a natural language inference problem and offer a new NLI dataset created by domain experts. The NLI framing allows us to create curricula combining existing datasets and our own. The resulting models are useful investigative tools. We provide a case study of how these models help a domain expert summarize and assess evidence concerning remdisivir and hydroxychloroquine.