It would be an exaggeration to say you'll never again read a news article overhyping a medical breakthrough. But, thanks to researchers at the University of Copenhagen, spotting hyperbole may one day get more manageable.
In a new paper, Dustin Wright and Isabelle Augenstein explain how they used NVIDIA GPUs to train an exaggeration detection system to identify overenthusiastic claims in health science reporting.
The paper comes amid a pandemic that has fueled demand for understandable, accurate information. And social media has made health misinformation more widespread.
Research like Wright and Augenstein's could speed more precise health sciences news to more people.
Read the full paper here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2108.13493.pdf.
A Sobering Realization' Part of the reason why things in popular journalism tend to get sensationalized is some of the journalists don't read the papers they're writing about, Wright says. It's a bit of a sobering realization.
It's hard to blame them. Many journalists need to summarize a lot of information fast and often don't have the time to dig deeper.
University of Copenhagen researcher Dustin Wright. That task falls on the press offices of universities and research institutions. They employ writers to produce press releases - short, news-style summaries - relied on by news outlets.
Shot On That makes the problem of detecting exaggeration in health sciences press releases a good few-shot learning use case.
Few-shot learning techniques can train AI in areas where data isn't plentiful - there are only a few items to learn from.
It's not the first time researchers have put natural language techniques to work detecting hype. Wright points to the earlier work of colleagues in scientific exaggeration detection and misinformation.
Wright and Augenstein's contribution is to reframe the problem and apply a novel, multitask-capable version of a technique called Pattern Exploiting Training, which they dubbed MT-PET.
The co-authors started by curating a collection that included both the releases and the papers they were summarizing.
Each pair, or tuple, has annotations from experts comparing claims made in the papers with those in corresponding press releases.
These 563 tuples gave them a strong base of training data.
They then broke the problem of detecting exaggeration into two related issues.
First, seeing the strength of claims made in press releases and the scientific papers they summarized. Then, identifying the level of exaggeration.
Teacher's PET They then ran this data through a novel kind of PET model, which learns much the way some second-grade students learn reading comprehension.
The training procedure relies on cloze-style phrases - phrases that mask a keyword an AI needs to fill - to ensure it understands a task.
For example, a teacher might ask a student to fill in the blanks in a sentence such as I ride a big ____ bus to school.
Researchers Dustin Wright and Isabel Augenstein created complementary pattern-verbalizer pairs for a main task and an auxiliary task. These pairs are then used to train a machine learning model on data from both tasks (source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2108.13493.pdf). If they answer yellow, the teacher knows they understand what they see. If not, the teacher knows the student needs more help.
Wright and Augenstein expanded on the idea to train a PET model to both detect the strength of claims made in press releases and to assess whether a press release overstates a papers' claims.
The researchers trained their models on a shared computing cluster, using four Intel Xeon CPUs and a single NVIDIA TITAN X GPU.
As a result, Wright and Augenstein were able to show how MT-PET outperforms PET and supervised learning.
Such technology could allow researchers to spot exaggeration in fields with a limited amount of expertise to classify training data.
AI-enabled grammar checkers can already help writers polish the quality of their prose.
One day, similar tools could help journalists summarize new findings more accurately, Wright says.
Not Easy To be sure, putting this research to work would need investment in production, marketing and usability, Wright says.
Wright's also realistic about the human factors that can lead to exaggeration.
Press releases convey information. But they also need to be bold enough to generate interest from reporters. Not always easy.
Whenever I tweet about stuff, I think, how can I get this tweet out without exaggeration,' Wright says. It's hard.
You can catch Dustin Wright and Isabella Augenstein on Twitter at @dustin_wright37 and @IAugenstein. Read their full paper, Semi-Supervised Exaggeration Detection of Health Science Press Releases, here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2108.13493.pdf.
Featured image credit: Vintage postcard, copyright expired.
Most recent headlines
25/12/2025
Holiday lights are twinkling, hot cocoa's on the stove and gamers are settling in for a well-earned break.
Whether staying in or heading on a winter getawa...
24/12/2025
What is AI good for? Posted by MTI Film on December 24, 2025
What is AI good for?
What is AI good for?
It's been three years since ChatGPT first cap...
24/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
24/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
24/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
24/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
24/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
24/12/2025
Back to All News
The Boyfriend' Season 2 Unveils Heartwarming Trailer, Key...
24/12/2025
Back to All News
Love, Fights, and Everything in Between: Badly in Love' Returns for Season 2
Entertainment
24 December 2025
GlobalJapan
Link copied t...
24/12/2025
Scripps Research study links sleep variability with sleep apnea and hypertension How consumers' digital activity trackers could enable personalized health s...
23/12/2025
How guilas Cibae as Dominican Winter League Games Are Locally Produced for Glob...
23/12/2025
BitFire's Jim Akimchuk on Supplying Scalability and Customization in the Clo...
23/12/2025
CAMB.AI Enables European Athletics to Offer Multi-Language SupportPlan is to eventually offer translation into all languages spoken in EuropeBy Ken Kerschbaumer...
23/12/2025
Analysis: As sports media values trend negative, scarcity and quality are king By Callum McCarthy, Editor-at-Large
Monday, December 22, 2025 - 14:08
Print ...
23/12/2025
ESPN, Disney, and NBA Return to the Animated Altcast Fray With Second Edition of...
23/12/2025
End the Year on a High Note and Donate to the Sports Broadcasting Fund Today! By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director
Tuesday, December 23, 2025 - 12:25 pm
...
23/12/2025
The year is winding down, the weather outside is frightful, and it's the perfect time to escape into a story that warms the heart. For listeners looking for...
23/12/2025
A Zeus motor is hot fire tested at L3Harris' Camden, Arkansas, solid rocket ...
23/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
23/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
23/12/2025
Lightware will exhibit several major product innovations at ISE 2026, including the new USB-C BOOSTER-V1, Google Meet. integration for various Taurus UCX models...
23/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
23/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
23/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
23/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
23/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
23/12/2025
Taking the Stage at Carnegie Hall-On a Global Scale Boston Conservatory Orchestra students reflect on their epic concert marking the 80th session of the UN Gene...
23/12/2025
Back to All News
Netflix's The Great Flood and Culinary Class Wars 2 Top Gl...
23/12/2025
Back to All News
Stranger Things By the Numbers: How the Global Phenomenon Shap...
23/12/2025
Experience the power of WO Automation for Radio's newest service, the System Effectiveness Review. Designed to help you achieve more, a System Effectiveness...
23/12/2025
23 Dec 2025
VEON's Beeline Kazakhstan and Rakuten Symphony Collaborate to A...
23/12/2025
Back to All News
How Steamy Can It Get? Single's Inferno' Season 5 Pre...
23/12/2025
Back to All News
33 Million Global Viewers on Netflix Watched Jake Paul vs. Ant...
23/12/2025
New technique lights up where drugs go in the body, cell by cell Scripps Research scientists developed a technique that maps drug binding in individual cells th...
22/12/2025
SVG New Sponsor Spotlight: Presidio's Neerav Shah on the Role of Its Captiva...
22/12/2025
Hitting the bullseye: Sky Sports readies itself for the biggest PDC World Darts ...
22/12/2025
Unique skillset: Bringing new directors to the world of darts at The Worlds with...
22/12/2025
Gravity Media prepares for a flight of fancy with the PDC World Darts Championsh...
22/12/2025
One hundred and eighty: Gravity Media on hitting the production bullseye at the ...
22/12/2025
The Famous Group's Jon Slusser on Fascinating Fans Through Immersive Content...
22/12/2025
ESPN's Meg Aronowitz on Continuing High-Quality Broadcasts of Collegiate Spo...
22/12/2025
ESPN Takes Data-Driven Storytelling to New Heights with MNF Playbook with Next ...
22/12/2025
For a decade, popular German podcast Fest & Flauschig has hosted an annual Chris...
22/12/2025
Paramount Scores Largest Share Increase Among Distributors as Paramount and CBS...
22/12/2025
New multi-year deal integrates Roku's data to fuel Nielsen's measurement suite
Roku gains access to Nielsen's streaming ratings, showing The Roku C...
22/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
22/12/2025
Berklee Wrapped 2025: Our Top News and Stories A look back at a year highlighted by faculty milestones, major film and television projects, Bob Dylan's ho...
22/12/2025
The works of Plato state that when humans have an experience, some level of change occurs in their brain, which is powered by memory - specifically long-term me...
It would be an exaggeration to say you'll never again read a news article overhyping a medical breakthrough. But, thanks to researchers at the University of Copenhagen, spotting hyperbole may one day get more manageable.
