Linguistics Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Linguistics, including details on human language, phonetics, syntax, phonology. | ||||||||
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Assisting consumer health information retrieval with query recommendations.Zeng QT, Crowell J, Plovnick RM, Kim E, Ngo L, Dibble E Department of Radiology, Decision Systems Group, Thorn 309, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 75 Francis St, Boston, MA 02115, USA. qzeng@dsg.bwh.harvard.edu 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 evaluation of the HIQuA system was conducted and a total of 213 subjects participated in the study. The subjects were randomized into 2 groups. One group was given query recommendations and the other was not. Each subject performed HIR for both a predefined and a self-defined task. RESULTS: The study showed that providing HIQuA recommendations resulted in statistically significantly higher rates of successful queries (odds ratio = 1.66, 95% confidence interval = 1.16-2.38), although no statistically significant impact on user satisfaction or the users' ability to accomplish the predefined retrieval task was found. CONCLUSION: Providing semantic-distance-based query recommendations can help consumers with query formation during HIR. Published 2 January 2006 in J Am Med Inform Assoc, 13(1): 80-90.
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