Assessing thesaurus-based query expansion using the UMLS Metathesaurus.
- 1 January 2000
- journal article
- research article
- p. 344-8
Abstract
Assess query expansion using thesaurus relationships and definitions in the UMLS Metathesaurus for improving searching performance. The queries from a MEDLINE test collection (OHSUMED) were expanded using synonym, hierarchical, and related term information as well as term definitions from the UMLS Metathesaurus. Documents were retrieved from a word-statistical retrieval system and assessed for recall and precision based on relevance judgments from the test collection. All types of query expansion degraded aggregate retrieval performance as measured by recall and precision, although 38.6% of the queries with synonym expansion and up to 29.7% of the queries with hierarchical expansion showed improvement. Thesaurus-based query expansion causes a decline in retrieval performance generally but improves it in specific instances. Further research must focus on identifying instances where performance improves and how it can be exploited by real users.This publication has 6 references indexed in Scilit:
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