NDLI: Enhancing web search in the medical domain via query clarification

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Soldaini, Luca Yates, Andrew Yom Tov, Elad Frieder, Ophir Goharian, Nazli
Copyright Year	2015
Abstract	The majority of Internet users search for medical information online; however, many do not have an adequate medical vocabulary. Users might have difficulties finding the most authoritative and useful information because they are unfamiliar with the appropriate medical expressions describing their condition; consequently, they are unable to adequately satisfy their information need. We investigate the utility of bridging the gap between layperson and expert vocabularies; our approach adds the most appropriate expert expression to queries submitted by users, a task we call query clarification. We evaluated the impact of query clarification. Using three different synonym mappings and conducting two task-based retrieval studies, users were asked to answer medically-related questions using interleaved results from a major search engine. Our results show that the proposed system was preferred by users and helped them answer medical concerns correctly more often, with up to a 7 % increase in correct answers over an unmodified query. Finally, we introduce a supervised classifier to select the most appropriate synonym mapping for each query, which further increased the fraction of correct answers (12 %).
Starting Page	149
Ending Page	173
Page Count	25
File Format	PDF
ISSN	13864564
Journal	Information Retrieval
Volume Number	19
Issue Number	1-2
e-ISSN	15737659
Language	English
Publisher	Springer Netherlands
Publisher Date	2015-07-16
Publisher Place	Dordrecht
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Subject Keyword	Query clarification Personalized search Medical informatics Health search Information Storage and Retrieval Document Preparation and Text Processing Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Data Structures, Cryptology and Information Theory Pattern Recognition
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Library and Information Sciences Information Systems

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