III: Medium: Ask the Experts: Generating Question-Answer Pairs for Addressing Information Deficits about Vaccines

This project aims to support decision-making by developing a scalable pipeline for identifying information deficits. In this context, deficits refer to topics where there is a high demand for credible information but the corresponding supply is low. The pipeline begins with developing automated methods for identifying emerging and extant vaccine-related concerns from online sources. The moves to the creation of generalized questions that exemplify the concerns and then match the questions to credible answers. The techniques developed as part of this research will facilitate decision-making in areas with an ever-evolving knowledge base of contextualized answers to challenging questions. The research will focus on addressing information deficits about vaccines as the target application domain. The pandemic and the rapid development of vaccines has resulted in many questions from the public. For example, has the COVID-19 vaccine led to more deaths than all other vaccines put together? As questions about vaccines continue to propagate in online communication channels, timely and accurate answers to them are key to supporting decision-making. The main thrusts of this research will be to develop methods for: (1) identifying emerging and extant vaccine-related concerns from online sources, such as social media and blogs, and categorizing them using a novel taxonomy; (2) generating contextualized questions from text aimed at addressing specific claims, concerns, knowledge gaps, and myths; and (3) matching the questions to credible answers when they exist, or otherwise recommending them to experts who can develop new answers. In addition to producing broadly applicable research results and knowledge artifacts, this project, guided by an expert advisory group on vaccinations, will develop a public-facing dashboard aimed at assisting public health and medical professionals by surfacing ongoing discussions about vaccines and highlighting the areas that require attention. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.