12 research outputs found

    MedEval — A Swedish medical test collection with doctors and patients user groups

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    Abstract Background Test collections for information retrieval are scarce. Domain specific test collections even more so, and medical test collections in the Swedish language non-existent prior to the making of the MedEval test collection. Most research in information retrieval has been performed in the English language, thus most test collections contain English documents. However, English is morphologically poor compared to many other European languages and a number of interesting and important aspects have not been investigated. Building a medical test collection in Swedish opens new research opportunities. Methods This article describes the making of and potential uses of MedEval, a Swedish medical test collection with assessments, not only for topical relevance, but also for target reader group: Doctors or Patients. A user of the test collection may choose if she wishes to search in the Doctors or the Patients scenario where the topical relevance assessments have been adjusted with consideration to user group, or to search in a scenario which regards only topical relevance. In addition to having three user groups, MedEval, in its present form, has two indexes, one where the terms are lemmatized and one where the terms are lemmatized and the compounds split and the constituents indexed together with the whole compound. Results Differences discovered between the documents written for medical professionals and documents written for laypersons are presented. These differences may be utilized in further studies of retrieval of documents aimed at certain groups of readers. Differences between the groups of documents are, for example, that professional documents have a higher ratio of compounds, have a greater average word length and contain more multi-word expressions. An experiment is described where the user scenarios have been utilized, searching with expert terms and lay terms, separately and in combination in the different scenarios. The tendency discovered is that the medical expert gets best results using expert terms and the lay person best results using lay terms, but also quite good results using expert terms or lay and expert terms in combination. Conclusions The many features of MedEval gives a variety of research possibilities, such as comparing the effectiveness of search terms when it comes to retrieving documents aimed at the different user groups or to study the effect of compound decomposition in retrieval of documents. As Swedish, the language of MedEval, is a morphologically more complex language than English, it is possible to study additional aspects of the effect of natural language processing in information retrieval, for example utilizing different inflectional word forms in the retrieval of expert vs lay documents. MedEval is the first Swedish test collection of the medical domain. Availability The Department of Swedish at the University of Gothenburg is in the process of making the MedEval test collection available to academic researchers.© 2011 Heppin; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

    MedEval Six Test Collections in One

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    Proceedings of the 17th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics NODALIDA 2009. Editors: Kristiina Jokinen and Eckhard Bick. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 4 (2009), 223-226. © 2009 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/9206

    Unmet goals of tracking: within-track heterogeneity of students' expectations for

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    Educational systems are often characterized by some form(s) of ability grouping, like tracking. Although substantial variation in the implementation of these practices exists, it is always the aim to improve teaching efficiency by creating homogeneous groups of students in terms of capabilities and performances as well as expected pathways. If students’ expected pathways (university, graduate school, or working) are in line with the goals of tracking, one might presume that these expectations are rather homogeneous within tracks and heterogeneous between tracks. In Flanders (the northern region of Belgium), the educational system consists of four tracks. Many students start out in the most prestigious, academic track. If they fail to gain the necessary credentials, they move to the less esteemed technical and vocational tracks. Therefore, the educational system has been called a 'cascade system'. We presume that this cascade system creates homogeneous expectations in the academic track, though heterogeneous expectations in the technical and vocational tracks. We use data from the International Study of City Youth (ISCY), gathered during the 2013-2014 school year from 2354 pupils of the tenth grade across 30 secondary schools in the city of Ghent, Flanders. Preliminary results suggest that the technical and vocational tracks show more heterogeneity in student’s expectations than the academic track. If tracking does not fulfill the desired goals in some tracks, tracking practices should be questioned as tracking occurs along social and ethnic lines, causing social inequality

    Esa 12th Conference: Differences, Inequalities and Sociological Imagination: Abstract Book

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    Esa 12th Conference: Differences, Inequalities and Sociological Imagination: Abstract Boo

    Resolving power of search keys in MedEval, a Swedish medical test collection with user groups: doctors and patients

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    This thesis describes the making of a Swedish medical text collection, unique in its kind in providing a possibility to choose user group: doctors or patients. The thesis also describes a series of pilot studies which demonstrate what kind of studies can be performed with such a collection. The pilot studies are focused on search key effectivity: What makes a search key good, and what makes a search key bad? The need to bring linguistics and consideration of terminology into the information retrieval research field is demonstrated. Most information retrieval is about finding free text documents. Documents are built of terms, as are topics and search queries. It is important to understand the functions and features of these terms and not treat them like featureless objects. The thesis concludes that terms are not equal, but show very different behavior. The thesis addresses the problem of compounds, which, if used as search keys, will not match corresponding simplex words in the documents, while simplex words as search keys will not match corresponding compounds in the documents. The thesis discusses how compounds can be split to obtain more matches, without lowering the quality of a search. Another important aspect of the thesis is that it considers how different language registers, in this case those of doctors and patients, can be utilized to find documents written with one of the groups in mind. As the test collection contains a large set of documents marked for intended target group, doctors or patients, the language differences can be and are studied. The author comes up with suggestions of how to choose search keys if documents from one category or the other are desired. Information retrieval is a multi-disciplinary research field. It involves computer science, information science, and natural language processing. There is a substantial amount of research behind the algorithms of modern search engines, but even with the best possible search algorithm the result of a search will not be successful without an effective query constructed with effective search keys
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