Exploiting term dependence while handling negation in medical search

Limsopatham, N., Macdonald, C. , Mccreadie, R. and Ounis, I. (2012) Exploiting term dependence while handling negation in medical search. In: SIGIR 2012: 35th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development on Information Retrieval, Portland OR, USA, 12-16 Aug 2012, pp. 1065-1066. (doi: 10.1145/2348283.2348471)

Abstract

In medical records, negative qualifiers, e.g. no or without, are commonly used by health practitioners to identify the absence of a medical condition. Without considering whether the term occurs in a negative or positive context, the sole presence of a query term in a medical record is insufficient to imply that the record is relevant to the query. In this paper, we show how to effectively handle such negation within a medical records information retrieval system. In particular, we propose a term representation that tackles negated language in medical records, which is further extended by considering the dependence of negated query terms. We evaluate our negation handling technique within the search task provided by the TREC Medical Records 2011 track. Our results, which show a significant improvement upon a system that does not consider negated context within records, attest the importance of handling negation.

• Item Type: Conference Proceedings
• Additional Information: ISBN: 9781450314725
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Mccreadie, Dr Richard and Macdonald, Professor Craig and Ounis, Professor Iadh
• Authors: Limsopatham, N., Macdonald, C., Mccreadie, R., and Ounis, I.
• Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science