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MedSearch: a specialized search engine for medical information retrieval

Published: 26 October 2008 Publication History

Abstract

People are thirsty for medical information. Existing Web search engines often cannot 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. Therefore, he sometimes prefers to pose long queries, describing his symptoms and situation in plain English, and receive comprehensive, relevant information from search results. This paper presents MedSearch, a specialized medical Web search engine, to address these challenges. MedSearch uses several key techniques to improve its usability and the quality of search results. First, it accepts queries of extended length and reforms long queries into shorter queries by extracting a subset of important and representative words. This not only significantly increases the query processing speed but also improves the quality of search results. Second, it provides diversified search results. Lastly, it suggests related medical phrases to help the user quickly digest search results and refine the query. We evaluated MedSearch using medical questions posted on medical discussion forums. The results show that MedSearch can handle various medical queries effectively and efficiently.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CIKM '08: Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Information and knowledge management
    October 2008
    1562 pages
    ISBN:9781595939913
    DOI:10.1145/1458082
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    Published: 26 October 2008

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    Author Tags

    1. medical query
    2. medical web search engine

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    CIKM08: Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
    October 26 - 30, 2008
    California, Napa Valley, USA

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    • (2021)How Context or Knowledge Can Benefit Healthcare Question AnsweringIEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering10.1109/TKDE.2021.3090253(1-1)Online publication date: 2021
    • (2020)Focused Query Expansion with Entity Cores for Patient-Centric Health SearchThe Semantic Web – ISWC 202010.1007/978-3-030-62419-4_31(547-564)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2020
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