Abstract

An important challenge for biomedical information retrieval (IR) is dealing with the complex, inconsistent and ambiguous biomedical terminology. Frequently, a concept-based representation defined in terms of a domain-specific terminological resource is employed todeal with this challenge. In thispaper, weapproachtheincorporationofaconcept-based representation in monolingual biomedical IR from a crosslingual perspective. In the proposed framework, this is realized by translating and matching between text and conceptbased representations. The approach allows for deployment of a rich set of techniques proposed and evaluated in traditional cross-lingual IR. We compare six translation models and measure their effectiveness in the biomedical domain. We demonstrate that the approach can result in significant improvements in retrieval effectiveness over word-based retrieval. Moreover, we demonstrate increased effectiveness of a CLIR framework for monolingual biomedical IR if basic translations models are combined.

Citations