Query expansion using medical subject headings terms in the biomedical documents

Abstract

Medline database is most resourceful of biomedical literatures. Lay users may get difficulty to formulate a query. Query expansion technique reformulates user query by adding more significant and related terms to original terms to retrieve more relevant results. Finding related terms are explored form external resources, collection and query context. Since each Medline document is manually assigned with controlled vocabularies which is called MeSH (Medical Subject Headings). These controlled vocabularies may be beneficial for query expansion. This paper proposes pseudo-relevance feedback by using MeSH terms in documents for query expansion. Additionally, re-weighting scheme called RABAM-PRF (Rank-Based MeSH Pseudo-Relevance Feedback) for filtering misleading terms is studied. In experiment, we use Lucene to retrieve the OHSUMED collection as baseline. The proposed method improves retrieval performance in MAP, P@10, and B-pref. Furthermore, the experiment showed that not all MeSH terms should be included to the query. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.