A language-modelling approach to User-Centred Health Information Retrieval
Suzan Verberne · 2014
Abstract. In this working notes paper we present our methodology and the results we obtained in task 3a of the CLEF eHealth lab 2014. In the set-up of our experiments we assumed that the discharge summary provides the context of the patient’s query, and therefore may contain useful background information that can be used to retrieve more rele-vant results. The central component in our approach is the Indri search engine, with its Language Modelling-based retrieval model. We experi-mented with query expansion using terms extracted from the discharge summary, and using terms extracted from the UMLS thesaurus. We obtained a small positive effect from expanding the Indri queries with terms from both sources. Our future work is directed at improving our term extraction and query expansion strategies. 1