Head Concepts Selection for Verbose Medical Queries Expansion

Semantic concepts and relations encoded in domain-specific ontologies and other medical semantic resources play a crucial role in deciphering terms in medical queries and documents. The exploitation of these resources for tackling the semantic gap issue has been widely studied in the literature. However, there are challenges that hinder their widespread use in real-world applications. Among these challenges is the insufficient knowledge individually encoded in existing medical ontologies, which is magnified when users express their information needs using long-winded natural language queries. In this context, many of the users’ query terms are either unrecognized by the used ontologies, or cause retrieving false positives that degrade the quality of current medical information search approaches. In this article, we explore the combination of multiple extrinsic semantic resources in the development of a full-fledged medical information search framework to: i) highlight and expand head medical concepts in verbose medical queries (i.e. concepts among query terms that significantly contribute to the informativeness and intent of a given query), ii) build semantically-enhanced inverted index documents, and iii) contribute to a heuristical weighting technique in the query-document matching process. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we conducted several experiments over the CLEF e-Health 2014 dataset. Findings indicate that the proposed method combining several extrinsic semantic resources proved to be more effective than related approaches in terms of precision measure.