Reliability prediction of webpages in the medical domain

Abstract

In this paper, we study how to automatically predict reliability of web pages in the medical domain. Assessing reliability of online medical information is especially critical as it may potentially influence vulnerable patients seeking help online. Unfortunately, there are no automated systems currently available that can classify a medical webpage as being reliable, while manual assessment cannot scale up to process the large number of medical pages on the Web. We propose a supervised learning approach to automatically predict reliability of medical webpages. We developed a gold standard dataset using the standard reliability criteria defined by the Health on Net Foundation and systematically experimented with different link and content based feature sets. Our experiments show promising results with prediction accuracies of over 80%. We also show that our proposed prediction method is useful in applications such as reliability-based re-ranking and automatic website accreditation. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.