Towards Automatic Improvement of Patient Queries in Health Retrieval Systems

Abstract

With the adoption of health information technology for clinical health, e-health is becoming usual practice today. Users of this technology find it difficult to seek information relevant to their needs due to the increasing amount of the clinical and medical data on the web, and the lack of knowledge of medical jargon. In this regards, a method is described to improve user's needs by automatically adding new related terms to their queries which appear in the same context of the original query in order to improve final search results. This method is based on the assessment of semantic relationships defined by a proposed statistical method between a set of terms or keywords. Experiments were performed on CLEF-eHealth-2015 database and the obtained results show the effectiveness of our proposed method.