Health information retrieval

Abstract

Searching health-related information on the Web has been increasing in the recent past. The methodologies and techniques to access and/or retrieve information related to health using the process of information retrieval are referred to Health Information Retrieval (HIR). In other words, a health information retrieval system produces a ranking of relevant documents that covers users’ information needs underlying health-related query. In this chapter, we present the noticeable challenges in health IR, the most prominent existing methods to solve the problems and future directions. The methods and techniques for health information retrieval are generally categorized into (a) general classical retrieval models and (b) advanced re-ranking techniques. This chapter also presents the details of the datasets, evaluation metrics and procedures to validate the performance of any HIR methods.