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The spread of fake news related to COVID-19 is an infodemic that leads to a public health crisis. Therefore, detecting fake news is crucial for an effective management of the COVID-19 pandemic response. Studies have shown that machine learning models can detect COVID-19 fake news based on the content of news articles. However, the use of biomedical information, which is often featured in COVID-19 news, has not been explored in the development of these models. We present a novel approach for predicting COVID-19 fake news by leveraging biomedical information extraction (BioIE) in combination with machine learning models. We analyzed 1164 COVID-19 news articles and used advanced BioIE algorithms to extract 158 novel features. These features were then used to train 15 machine learning classifiers to predict COVID-19 fake news. Among the 15 classifiers, the random forest model achieved the best performance with an area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 0.882, which is 12.36% to 31.05% higher compared to models trained on traditional features. Furthermore, incorporating BioIE-based features improved the performance of a state-of-the-art multi-modality model (AUC 0.914 vs. 0.887). Our study suggests that incorporating biomedical information into fake news detection models improves their performance, and thus could be a valuable tool in the fight against the COVID-19 infodemic. 

Educational institutions increasingly recognize the role that student belonging plays in retention. Many studies in this area focus on helping students improve a sense of belonging before they matriculate or identifying belonging as a reason for their departure. This study measures students’ sense of belonging at key transition points during the first year and finds that social belonging and academic performance are both strong predictors of retention that are not necessarily correlated. These results suggest that a comprehensive, focused outreach protocol that encompasses both social and academic factors could have a positive impact on student persistence.