Query Refinement: Negation Detection and Proximity Learning Georgetown at TREC 2014 Clinical Decision Support Track

Abstract

In this paper we describe our efforts for TREC Clinical Decision Support Track 2014. Our system takes medical case narratives as input and returns relevant biomedical articles to answer clinical questions to determine the patient's diagnosis, the tests the patient should receive, and how the patient should be treated. We model each topic as highly representative keyword-based structured queries. Since both the topics and returned documents are written in highly technical language, we address the traditional vocabulary gap present within medical information retrieval, while also focusing on employing methodologies to refine our queries by detecting negation and applying query proximity learning. We hypothesized terms with high frequency among the topics, which are likely to create noise and impair the return of highly relevant documents. Our top two runs utilizing negation detection perform above the median for P@10, R-Prec, and infAP, and our other three runs that utilized proximity learning performed approximately consistent with the median. More research is required to explore the potential benefits of proximity learning over a more robust set of topics.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Nov 01, 2014
Accession Number
ADA618548

Entities

People

  • Christopher Wing
  • Hui Yang

Organizations

  • Georgetown University

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Amino Acids
  • Classification
  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Detection
  • Diseases And Disorders
  • Filtration
  • Geographic Regions
  • Health Care
  • Laboratory Procedures
  • Language
  • Learning
  • Mental Processes
  • Natural Languages
  • Pain
  • Standards
  • Words (Language)

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computational Linguistics
  • Information Retrieval
  • Medical or Health Care Field.

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Information Retrieval
  • AI & ML - Neural Networks
  • Biotechnology