title: Towards organizing health knowledge on community-based health services.
abstract: Online community-based health services accumulate a huge amount of unstructured health question answering (QA) records at a continuously increasing pace. The ability to organize these health QA records has been found to be effective for data access. The existing approaches for organizing information are often not applicable to health domain due to its domain nature as characterized by complex relation among entities, large vocabulary gap, and heterogeneity of users. To tackle these challenges, we propose a top-down organization scheme, which can automatically assign the unstructured health-related records into a hierarchy with prior domain knowledge. Besides automatic hierarchy prototype generation, it also enables each data instance to be associated with multiple leaf nodes and profiles each node with terminologies. Based on this scheme, we design a hierarchy-based health information retrieval system. Experiments on a real-world dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our scheme in organizing health QA into a topic hierarchy and retrieving health QA records from the topic hierarchy.
authors.affiliation: School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering, NUS, Singapore, Singapore ; School of Computing, NUS, Singapore, Singapore.
authors.forename: Mohammad
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-3321-5775
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Akbari
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA.
authors.forename: Xia
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Hu
authors.affiliation: School of Computing, NUS, Singapore, Singapore.
authors.forename: Liqiang
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Nie
authors.affiliation: School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering, NUS, Singapore, Singapore ; School of Computing, NUS, Singapore, Singapore.
authors.forename: Tat-Seng
authors.initials: TS
authors.lastname: Chua
keywords: Community question-answering; Consumer health information; Information organization; Information retrieval