title: Trustworthiness and relevance in web-based clinical question answering.
abstract: Question answering systems try to give precise answers to a user's question posed in natural language. It is of utmost importance that the answers returned are relevant to the user's question. For clinical QA, the trustworthiness of answers is another important issue. Limiting the document collection to certified websites helps to improve the trustworthiness of answers. On the other hand, limited document collections are known to harm the relevancy of answers. We show, however, in a comparative evaluation, that promoting trustworthiness has no negative effect on the relevance of the retrieved answers in our clinical QA system. On the contrary, the answers found are in general more relevant.
authors.affiliation: Health on the Net Foundation, Geneva, Switzerland. sarah.cruchet@healthonnet.org
authors.forename: Sarah
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Cruchet
authors.forename: Célia
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Boyer
authors.forename: Lonneke
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: van der Plas
mesh_terms: D063005:Health Information Systems; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D020407:Internet; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D057386:Search Engine; D017216:Telemedicine; D035502:Trust