Skip to main content
Log in

Expanding user’s query with tag-neighbors for effective medical information retrieval

  • Published:
Multimedia Tools and Applications Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Medical information is a natural human demand. Existing search engines on the Web often are unable to handle medical search well because they do not consider its special requirements. Often a medical information searcher is uncertain about his exact questions and unfamiliar with medical terminology. Under-specified queries often lead to undesirable search results that do not contain the information needed. To overcome the limitations of under-specified queries, we utilize tags to enhance information retrieval capabilities by expanding users’ original queries with context-relevant information. We compute a set of significant tag neighbor candidates based on the neighbor frequency and weight, and utilize the qualified tag neighbors to expand an entry query. The proposed approach is evaluated by using MedWorm medical article collection and results show considerable precision improvements over state-of-the-art approaches.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. This journal version was previously published at the International Conference on Information Science and Applications (ICISA 2011) [11] and the main differences from previous work to this are: (i) enhancement of related work by including new comparative studies, (ii) extension of evaluation by comparing our results against state-of-the-art approaches and (iii) execution of an efficiency assessment to demonstrate the retrieval latency when tag neighbors are considered.

References

  1. Anderson TW, Anderson TW (1984) An introduction to multivariate statistical analysis, 2nd edn. Wiley-Interscience

  2. Andreou A (2005) Agissilaos andreou. Master thesis, Agissilaos andreou

  3. Baeza-Yates RA, Ribeiro-Neto B (1999) Modern information retrieval. Addison-Wesley

  4. Bianco CE (2009) Medical librarians’ uses and perceptions of social tagging. J Med Libr Assoc : JMLA 97(2):136–139

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Carpineto C, de Mori R, Romano G, Bigi B (2001) An information-theoretic approach to automatic query expansion. ACM Trans Inf Sys 19(1):1–27

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Clarke SJ, Willett P (1997) Estimating the recall performance of web search engines. Aslib Proc 49(7):184–189

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Díaz-Galiano M, Martín-Valdivia M, Ureña-López L (2009) Query expansion with a medical ontology to improve a multimodal information retrieval system. Comput Biol Med 39(4):396–403

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Diem LT, Chevallet J-P, Thuy DT (2007) Thesaurus-based query and document expansion in conceptual indexing with UMLS: Application in medical information retrieval. In: Research, Innovation and Vision for the Future, 2007 IEEE International Conference on concept, image, medical, retrieval, umls. pp 242–246. http://ieeexploreieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4223080

  9. Dozier C, Kondadadi R, Al-Kofahi K, Chaudhary M, Guo X (2007) Fast tagging of medical terms in legal text. In: Proceedings of the 11th international conference on artificial intelligence and law. ACM, ICAIL ’07, New York, USA, pp 253–260

  10. Durao F, Dolog P (2010) Extending a hybrid tag-based recommender system with personalization. In: SAC ’10: proceedings of the 2010 ACM symposium on applied computing. ACM, New York, USA, pp 1723–1727

    Google Scholar 

  11. Durao F, Bayyapu K, Xu G, Dolog P, Lage R (2011) Using tag-neighbors for query expansion in medical information retrieval. Inf Sci and App (ICISA) 0:1–9

    Google Scholar 

  12. Efthimiadis EN (1993) A user-centred evaluation of ranking algorithms for interactive query expansion. In: SIGIR ’93: proceedings of the 16th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information retrieval. ACM, New York, USA, pp 146–159

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  13. Fu WT, Kannampallil T, Kang R, He J (2010) Semantic imitation in social tagging. ACM Trans Comput-Hum Interact 17:12:1–12:37

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Gordon-Murnane L (2006) Social bookmarking, folksonomies, and web 2.0 tools. Searcher Mag Database Prof 14(6):26–28

    Google Scholar 

  15. Gruber T (2008) Collective knowledge systems: where the social web meets the semantic web. Web Semant 6:4–13

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Hatcher E, Gospodnetic O (2004) Lucene in action (in action series). Manning Publications Co., Greenwich, CT, USA

    Google Scholar 

  17. Hersh WR, Hickam DH (1998) How well do physicians use electronic information retrieval systems? a framework for investigation and systematic review. JAMA 280(15):1347–1352

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. IWISPlatform (2012) https://sourceforge.net/projects/iwis/files/. Accessed 1 April 2012

  19. Jain H, Thao C, Zhao H (2010) Enhancing electronic medical record retrieval through semantic query expansion. Information systems and e-business management, pp 1–17

  20. Jang H, Song SK, Myaeng SH (2006) Semantic tagging for medical knowledge tracking. In: Engineering in medicine and biology society, 2006. EMBS ’06. 28th Annual international conference of the IEEE

  21. Jansen BJ, Spink A, Bateman J, Saracevic T (1998) Real life information retrieval: a study of user queries on the web. SIGIR Forum 32(1):5–17

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Järvelin K, Kekäläinen J (2002) Cumulated gain-based evaluation of ir techniques. ACM Trans Inf Syst 20(4):422–446

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Jin S, Lin H, Su S (2009) Query expansion based on folksonomy tag co-occurrence analysis. In: GRC ’09 IEEE international conference on granular computing, 2009, pp 300–305

  24. Johnson SB (1999) Semantic lexicon for medical language processing. J Am Med Inform Assoc 6(3):205–218

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Kelly D, Cushing A, Dostert M, Niu X, Gyllstrom K (2010) Effects of popularity and quality on the usage of query suggestions during information search. In: Proceedings of the 28th international conference on human factors in computing systems. ACM, New York, USA, CHI ’10, pp 45–54

    Google Scholar 

  26. Liu Z, Chu WW (2005) Knowledge-based query expansion to support scenario-specific retrieval of medical free text. In: SAC ’05: proceedings of the 2005 ACM symposium on applied computing. ACM, New York, USA, pp 1076–1083

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  27. Lu Z, Kim W, Wilbur W (2009) Evaluation of query expansion using mesh in pubmed. Inf Retr 12:69–80

    Article  Google Scholar 

  28. Luo G, Tang C, Yang H, Wei X (2008) Medsearch: a specialized search engine for medical information retrieval. In: Proceeding of the 17th ACM conference on information and knowledge management. ACM, New York, USA, CIKM ’08, pp 143–152

    Google Scholar 

  29. Ma H, Yang H, King I, Lyu MR (2008) Learning latent semantic relations from clickthrough data for query suggestion. In: Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on information and knowledge management. ACM, New York, USA, CIKM ’08, pp 709–718

    Google Scholar 

  30. Matos S, Arrais J, Maia-Rodrigues J, Oliveira J (2010) Concept-based query expansion for retrieving gene related publications from medline. BMC Bioinformatics 11(1):212

    Article  Google Scholar 

  31. MedWorm (2012) http://www.medworm.com. Accessed 1 April 2012

  32. Mei Q, Zhou D, Church K (2008) Query suggestion using hitting time. In: Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on information and knowledge management. ACM, New York, USA, CIKM ’08, pp 469–478

  33. MeSH (2012) http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh. Accessed 1 April 2012

  34. Milicevic A, Nanopoulos A, Ivanovic M (2010) Social tagging in recommender systems: a survey of the state-of-the-art and possible extensions. Artif Intell Rev 33(3):187–209

    Article  Google Scholar 

  35. Orange (2012) http://www.orange.com. Accessed 1 April 2012

  36. PubMed (2012) http://www.medworm.com. Accessed 1 April 2012

  37. Ravid G, Bar-Ilan J, Baruchson-Arbib S, Rafaeli S (2007) Popularity and findability through log analysis of search terms and queries: the case of a multilingual public service website. J Inf Sci 33(5):567–583

    Article  Google Scholar 

  38. Ruch P, Wagner J, Bouillon P, Baud RH, Rassinoux AM, Scherrer JR (1999) Medtag: tag-like semantics for medical document indexing. J Am Med Inform Assoc 6(3):205–218

    Article  Google Scholar 

  39. Smith G (2007) Tagging: people-powered metadata for the social web (voices that matter). New Riders Press

  40. Strohmaier M (2008) Purpose tagging: capturing user intent to assist goal-oriented social search. In: Proceeding of the 2008 ACM workshop on search in social media. ACM, New York, USA, SSM ’08, pp 35–42

  41. TREC (2012) http://trec.nist.gov. Accessed 1 April 2012

  42. UMLS (2012) http://semanticnetwork.nlm.nih.gov/Download/RelationalFiles/SRSTRE2. Accessed 1 April 2012

  43. West J (2007) Subject headings 2.0: folksonomies and tags. LMC 25(7):58–59

    Google Scholar 

  44. Yuan MJ, Orshalick J, Heute T (2009) Seam framework: experience the evolution of java EE, 2nd edn. Prentice Hall PTR, Upper Saddle River, NJ, USA

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This work has been partially supported by FP7 ICT project M-Eco: Medical Ecosystem Personalized Event-Based Surveillance under grant number 247829. This journal is a extended version of previously published paper at the International Conference on Information Science and Applications (ICISA 2011).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Frederico Durao.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Durao, F., Bayyapu, K., Xu, G. et al. Expanding user’s query with tag-neighbors for effective medical information retrieval. Multimed Tools Appl 71, 905–929 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-012-1316-5

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-012-1316-5

Keywords

Navigation