Characterizing Health-Related Information Needs of Domain Experts

Abstract

In information retrieval literature, understanding the users’ intents behind the queries is critically important to gain a better insight of how to select relevant results. While many studies investigated how users in general carry out exploratory health searches in digital environments, a few focused on how are the queries formulated, specifically by domain expert users. This study intends to fill this gap by studying 173 health expert queries issued from 3 medical information retrieval tasks within 2 different evaluation compaigns. A statistical analysis has been carried out to study both variation and correlation of health-query attributes such as length, clarity and specificity of either clinical or non clinical queries. The knowledge gained from the study has an immediate impact on the design of future health information seeking systems.