Context-Based Health Information Retrieval Thesis proposal

Health Information Retrieval is the application of Information Retrieval concepts and techniques to the healthcare domain. Contextual Information Retrieval is a subarea of IR that incorporates context features in the search process towards its improvement. Both areas have been gaining interest from the research community but it’s not frequent to see the combination of both. The Ph.D. research proposed in this report intends to combine these two areas and has three main purposes. First it intends to investigate the effects of interaction, user and task context features on consumers health information seeking behavior and on document preference. Second, to study how health information seeking behavior can be used to predict context features that can, therefore, be gathered and used, without disturbing the user with explicit questions. Thirdly it aims to develop and evaluate query expansion approaches based on the studied context features. This proposal includes a literature review on the application of context in HIR, a statement of the research problem, a description of the research already conducted and a research plan to the achievement of this Ph.D.’s goals.