Creating Topic Hierarchies for Large Medical Libraries

Web-based medical digital libraries contain a huge amount of valuable, up-to-date health care information. However, their size, their keywordbased access methods and their lack of semantic structure make it difficult to find the desired information. In this paper we present an automatic, unsupervised and domain-independent approach for structuring the resources available in an electronic repository. The system automatically detects and extracts the main topics related to a given domain, building a taxonomical structure. Our Web-based system is integrated smoothly with the digital library’s search engine, offering a tool for accessing the library’s resources by hierarchically browsing domain topics in a comprehensive and natural way. The system has been tested over the well-known PubMed medical library, obtaining better topic hierarchies than those generated by widely-used taxonomic search engines employing clustering techniques.