Title
Finding Relevant Passages in Scientific Articles: Fusion of Automatic Approaches vs. an Interactive Team Effort
Abstract
This paper presents our approach to retargeting the information retrieval systems designed and/or optimized for retrieval of MEDLINE citations to the task of finding relevant passages in the text of scientific articles. To continue using our TREC 2005 fusion approach, we needed a common representation for the full text biomedical articles to be shared by the four base systems (Essie, SMART, EasyIR and Theme.) The base systems relied upon previously developed NLP, statistical and ML methods. The fusion of the automatic runs improved the results of three contributing base systems at 99.9% significance level on all metrics: document, passage, and aspect precision. The fusion run outperformed Essie, the best of the base systems, at 94% to 99% significance level, with the exception of passage precision. The novelty of the task and the lack of training data inspired our exploration of an interactive approach. The prohibitive cost (in time and domain expert effort) required for a truly interactive retrieval led to a team interaction with one of the base systems - Essie. The initial queries were developed by a computational biologist and a medical librarian. The librarian merged and then refined the queries upon inspecting the initial search results. The refined queries were submitted as a batch without further interaction with the system. The interactive results, the best we achieved, improved over the baseline automatic Essie run at the 91% significance level. The difference between the fusion and the interactive results is not statistically significant.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2006
TREC
medline/pubmed,vector,interactive information retrieval,genomics,mesh
Field
DocType
Citations 
Training set,Information retrieval,Computer science,Subject-matter expert,Retargeting,Novelty,MEDLINE
Conference
11
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.90
9
11
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Dina Demner Fushman11717147.70
Dina Demner Fushman21717147.70
Susanne M. Humphrey356163.27
Nicholas C. Ide49110.78
Russell Loane59011.57
Lawrence H. Smith619614.48
Lorraine Tanabe738329.80
W. John Wilbur842443.91
Alan R. Aronson92551260.67
Patrick Ruch1011916.27
Miguel E. Ruiz1162647.00