Assisting consumer health information retrieval with query recommendations.

ABSTRACT:

Objective

Health information retrieval (HIR) on the Internet has become an important practice for millions of people, many of whom have problems forming effective queries. We have developed and evaluated a tool to assist people in health-related query formation.

Design

We developed the Health Information Query Assistant (HIQuA) system. The system suggests alternative/additional query terms related to the user's initial query that can be used as building blocks to construct a better, more specific query. The recommended terms are selected according to their semantic distance from the original query, which is calculated on the basis of concept co-occurrences in medical literature and log data as well as semantic relations in medical vocabularies.

Measurements

An evaluat

SUBMITTER: Zeng QT 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1380203 | biostudies-literature | 2006 Jan-Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature