Query expansion using medical information extraction for improving information retrieval in French medical domain

Many users’ queries contain references to named entities, and this is particularly true in the medical field. Doctors express their information needs using medical entities as they are elements rich with information that helps to better target the relevant documents. At the same time, many resources have been recognized as a large container of medical entities and relationships between them such as clinical reports; which are medical texts written by doctors. In this paper, we present a query expansion method that uses medical entities and their semantic relations in the query context based on an external resource in OWL. The goal of this method is to evaluate the effectiveness of an information retrieval system to support doctors in accessing easily relevant information. Experiments on a collection of real clinical reports show that our approach reveals interesting improvements in precision, recall and MAP in medical information retrieval

Collateral Damage: When Should the Determinations of Administrative Adjudications Have Collateral Estoppel Effect in Subsequent Adjudications?

Collateral estoppel is an equitable doctrine under which a court gives issue-preclusive effect to findings of fact or law made in previous proceedings. The U.S. Supreme Court has recently held that under certain circumstances, the determinations of administrative adjudications have collateral estoppel effect in federal court. The Court, however, did not address under which circumstances the determinations of administrative adjudications should have collateral estoppel effect in subsequent administrative adjudications. There has been little clear and consistent reasoning in lower federal courts about when collateral estoppel should apply in administrative adjudications, and administrative agencies vary widely in their application of collateral estoppel when conducting adjudications. This Note argues that neither the balancing test used to apply collateral estoppel in federal court nor the more formalistic per se rules proposed by some commentators are appropriate when applying collateral estoppel between administrative adjudications. Instead, courts should defer to agencies, granting them wide discretion to recognize or not recognize the collateral estoppel effect of prior administrative adjudications

Arabic Query Expansion Using WordNet and Association Rules

Query expansion is the process of adding additional relevant terms to the original queries to improve the performance of information retrieval systems. However, previous studies showed that automatic query expansion using WordNet do not lead to an improvement in the performance. One of the main challenges of query expansion is the selection of appropriate terms. In this paper, we review this problem using Arabic WordNet and Association Rules within the context of Arabic Language. The results obtained confirmed that with an appropriate selection method, we are able to exploit Arabic WordNet to improve the retrieval performance. Our empirical results on a sub-corpus from the Xinhua collection showed that our automatic selection method has achieved a significant performance improvement in terms of MAP and recall and a better precision with the first top retrieved documents

User interfaces for information systems

This paper presents descriptions of four information-system interface projects in progress at ESRIN, each demonstrating a somewhat different approach to interface design, but ali sharing the commonality of responding to user goals, tasks and characteristics. It is suggested that next-generation scientific information systems will have to be designed for direct access by end users to a large variety of information sources, through a commom interface. Design of such systems, including their interfaces, should be based on a multi-level analysis of user goals, tasks and domain views.Se describen cuatro proyectos de interfaces de sistemas de información que se están desarrollando en ESRIN (establecimiento de la Agencia Espacial Europea, en Frascati). Cada uno de ellos muestra un enfoque diferente del diseño de interfaces, pero todos tienen en común el responder a los objetivos, tareas y características de los usuarios. Se sugiere que la próxima generación de sistemas de información científica se tendrá que diseñar para permitir el acceso directo de los usuarios finales a una gran variedad de fuentes de información a través de una interfaz común. El diseño de tales sistemas y de sus interfaces debería basarse en un análisis multinivel de objetivos, tareas y puntos de vista propios de la materia de trabajo de cada usuario