III: Medium: This project aims to “support decision-making by developing a scalable pipeline for identifying information deficits. The pipeline begins with developing automated methods for identifying emerging and extant vaccine-related concerns from online sources. This moves to the creation of generalized questions that exemplify the concerns and then match the questions to credible answers. 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.

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.”