CLEF eHealth Evaluation Lab 2015, Task 2: Retrieving Information About Medical Symptoms

This paper details methods, results and analysis of the CLEF 2015 eHealth Evaluation Lab, Task 2. This task investigates the effectiveness of web search engines in providing access to medical information with the aim of fostering advances in the development of these technologies. The problem considered in this year’s task was to retrieve web pages to support information needs of health consumers that are confronted with a sign, symptom or condition and that seek information through a search engine, with the aim to understand which condition they may have. As part of this evaluation exercise, 66 query topics were created by potential users based on images and videos of conditions. Topics were first created in English and then translated into a number of other languages. A total of 97 runs by 12 different teams were submitted for the English query topics; one team submitted 70 runs for the multilingual topics.