Identification and Classification of Health Queries: Co-Occurrences vs. Domain-Specific Terminologies

Identifying the user's intent behind a query is a key challenge in Information Retrieval. This information may be used to contextualize the search and provide better search results to the user. The automatic identification of queries targeting a search for health information allows the implementation of retrieval strategies specifically focused on the health domain. In this paper, two kinds of automatic methods to identify and classify health queries based on domain-specific terminology are proposed. Besides evaluating these methods, we compare them with a method that is based on co-occurrence statistics of query terms with the word “health”. Although the best overall result was achieved with a variant of the co-occurrence method, the method based on domain-specific frequencies that generates a continuous output outperformed most of the other methods. Moreover, this method also allows the association of queries to the semantic tree of the Unified Medical Language System and thereafter their classification into appropriate subcategories.