NovaSearch at TREC 2014 Clinical Decision Support Track

Abstract

This paper describes the participation of the NovaSearch group at TREC Clinical Decision Support 2014. As this is the first edition of the track, we decided to assess the performance of multiple information retrieval techniques: retrieval functions, re-ranking, query expansion and classification of medical articles into question categories. The best performing run was based on an ensemble of state-of-the-art retrieval algorithms combined with unsupervised fusion. Our best run was based on the late fusion of runs using MeSH query expansion, pseudo-relevance feedback with terms from top retrieved results and multiple retrieval functions (BM25L, BM25+, TF-IDF and Language Models) combined with RRF fusion algorithm. We also tested an algorithm to measure article relevance to the target medical questions (diagnosis, test and treatment articles), based on the frequency of words to some categories. An additional experiment was based on pseudo relevance feedback based on each article's journal reputation. Although some techniques did not increase our baseline performance, we are satisfied with our global performance.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Nov 01, 2014
Accession Number
ADA618803

Entities

People

  • Andre Mourao
  • Flavio Martins
  • Joao Magalhaes

Organizations

  • NOVA University Lisbon

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Algorithms
  • Classification
  • Feedback
  • Hierarchies
  • Information Operations
  • Instructions
  • Language
  • Portugal
  • Standards
  • Words (Language)

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Enterprise Information Systems Architecture and Joint Command Capability Interoperability Support.
  • Information Retrieval
  • Instructional Design and Training Evaluation.

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Information Retrieval