title: Leveraging user query sessions to improve searching of medical literature.
abstract: Published reports about searching medical literature do not refer to leveraging the query context, as expressed by previous queries in a session. We aimed to assess novel strategies for context-aware searching, hypothesizing that this would be better than baseline. Building upon methods using term frequency-inverse document frequency, we added extensions such as a function incorporating search results and terms of previous queries, with higher weights for more recent queries. Among 60 medical students generating queries against the TREC 9 benchmark dataset, we assessed recall and mean average precision. For difficult queries, we achieved improvement (27%) in average precision over baseline. Improvements in recall were also seen. Our methods outperformed baseline by 4% to 14% on average. Furthermore, the effectiveness of context-aware search was greater for longer query sessions, which are typically more challenging. In conclusion, leveraging the previous queries in a session improved overall search quality with this biomedical database.
authors.affiliation: Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, Riverside, CA;
authors.forename: Shiwen
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Cheng
authors.affiliation: Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, Riverside, CA;
authors.forename: Vagelis
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Hristidis
authors.affiliation: Center of Excellence on Implementing Evidence-Based Practice, Department of Veterans Affairs, Veterans Health Administration, Health Services Research and Development Service HFP 04-148, Indianapolis, IN ; Indiana University Center for Health Services and Outcomes Research, Indianapolis, IN ; Regenstrief Institute, Inc., Indianapolis, IN.
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Weiner
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D039781:PubMed; D057386:Search Engine; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity