DCU@TRECMed 2012: Using Ad-Hoc Baselines for Domain-Specific Retrieval

Abstract

This paper describes the first participation of DCU in the TREC Medical Records Track (TRECMed) 2012. We performed initial experiments on the 2011 TRECMed data based on the BM25 retrieval model. Surprisingly, we found that the standard BM25 model with default parameters performs comparable to the best automatic runs submitted to TRECMed 2011 and our experiments would have ranked among the top four out of 29 participating groups. We expected that some form of domain adaptation would increase performance. However results on the 2011 data proved otherwise: query expansion decreased performance, and filtering and reranking by term proximity also decreased performance slightly. We submitted four runs based on the BM25 retrieval model to TRECMed 2012 using standard BM25, standard query expansion, result filtering, and concept-based query expansion. Official results for 2012 confirm that domain-specific knowledge, as applied by us, does not increase performance compared to the BM25 baseline.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Nov 01, 2012
Accession Number
ADA579319

Entities

People

  • Gareth J. Jones
  • Johannes Leveling
  • Liadh Kelly
  • Lorraine Goeuriot

Organizations

  • Dublin City University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Automatic
  • Base Lines
  • Demographic Cohorts
  • European Union
  • Feedback
  • Filtration
  • Human-Machine Interaction
  • Index Terms
  • Indexes
  • Information Operations
  • Information Retrieval
  • Language
  • Models
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Natural Languages
  • Standards
  • Test And Evaluation

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Information Retrieval
  • Psychological Intervention/Treatment for Stress, Anxiety, PTSD, and Related Emotional and Cognitive Health Symptoms.