Using a medical thesaurus to predict query difficulty

Authors:
Florian Boudin;Jian-Yun Nie;Martin Dawes
Affiliations:
Université de Nantes, France;Université de Montréal, Canada;University of British Columbia, Canada
Venue:
ECIR'12 Proceedings of the 34th European conference on Advances in Information Retrieval
Year:
2012

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Abstract

Estimating query performance is the task of predicting the quality of results returned by a search engine in response to a query. In this paper, we focus on pre-retrieval prediction methods for the medical domain. We propose a novel predictor that exploits a thesaurus to ascertain how difficult queries are. In our experiments, we show that our predictor outperforms the state-of-the-art methods that do not use a thesaurus.