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Knowledge-based query expansion to support scenario-specific retrieval of medical free text

Published: 13 March 2005 Publication History

Abstract

In retrieving medical free text, users are often interested in answers relevant to certain scenarios, scenarios that correspond to common tasks in medical practice, e.g., "treatment" or "diagnosis" of a disease. Consequently, the queries they pose are often scenario-specific, e.g., "lung cancer, treatment." A fundamental challenge in handling such queries is that scenario terms in the query (e.g. "treatment") are too general to match specialized terms in relevant documents (e.g. "lung excision"). In this paper we propose a knowledge-based query expansion method that exploits the UMLS knowledge source to append the original query with additional terms that are specifically relevant to the query's scenario(s). We compare the proposed method with statistical expansion that only explores statistical term correlation and expands terms that are not necessarily scenario specific. Our study on the OHSUMED testbed shows that the knowledge-based method which results in scenario-specific expansion is able to improve more than 5% over the statistical method on average, and about 10% for queries that mention certain scenarios, such as "treatment of a disease" and "differential diagnosis of a symptom/disease."

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SAC '05: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM symposium on Applied computing
    March 2005
    1814 pages
    ISBN:1581139640
    DOI:10.1145/1066677
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    Published: 13 March 2005

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    Author Tags

    1. automatic query expansion
    2. knowledge-based approach
    3. medical free-text retrieval

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    March 13 - 17, 2005
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    • (2016)Personalized Medical Reading Recommendation: Deep Semantic ApproachDatabase Systems for Advanced Applications10.1007/978-3-319-32055-7_8(89-97)Online publication date: 12-Apr-2016
    • (2014)Expanding user's query with tag-neighbors for effective medical information retrievalMultimedia Tools and Applications10.1007/s11042-012-1316-571:2(905-929)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2014
    • (2013)Medical Information Retrieval Enhanced with User’s Query Expanded with Tag-NeighborsHandbook of Medical and Healthcare Technologies10.1007/978-1-4614-8495-0_2(17-40)Online publication date: 21-Nov-2013
    • (2013)A passage extractor for classification of disease aspect informationJournal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology10.1002/asi.2292664:11(2265-2277)Online publication date: 27-Aug-2013
    • (2012)An Integrated Query Relaxation Approach Adopting Data Abstraction and Fuzzy RelationCross-Disciplinary Models and Applications of Database Management10.4018/978-1-61350-471-0.ch015(359-384)Online publication date: 2012
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    • (2012)Enhancing electronic medical record retrieval through semantic query expansionInformation Systems and e-Business Management10.1007/s10257-010-0133-510:2(165-181)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2012
    • (2012)Thesaurus-Assistant Query Expansion for Context-Based Medical Image RetrievalThe Era of Interactive Media10.1007/978-1-4614-3501-3_2(15-24)Online publication date: 3-Aug-2012
    • (2011)Concept-Based Information Retrieval Using Explicit Semantic AnalysisACM Transactions on Information Systems10.1145/1961209.196121129:2(1-34)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2011
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