Query Expansion using External Resources for Improving Information Retrieval in the Biomedical Domain.

Abstract

Abstract. This paper presents the first participation of the ERIAS team in task 3 of the ShARe/CLEF eHealth Evaluation Lab 2014. The goal of this task is to evaluate the effectiveness of Information Retrieval systems to support patients in accessing easily relevant information. We propose a method which exploits external resources for improving information retrieval in the biomedical do-main. The proposed approach is based on the well-known Vector Space Model and it uses two extensions of this model to enhance its performance. Specifical-ly, the MeSH thesaurus is used for query expansion with different configura-tions. Experiments on a large collection of documents have shown that the use of these external resources can improve performance in medical in-formation retrieval.