Exploring Query Expansion for Entity Searches in PubMed

Identifying relevant studies from the entire scientific literature is an important task in biomedical research. Past efforts have incorporated semantically recognized biological entities and medical ontologies into biomedical literature search. However, semantic relations are largely overlooked by biomedical search engines. In this work, we aim to discover synonymous biomedical semantic relations between entities and explore their uses in query (semantics) understanding for improved retrieval performance. Specifically, we discover synonymous semantic relations from PubMed queries and apply them to query expansion and specification. In these two real-world scenarios, better PubMed retrieval effectiveness, in terms of recall and precision, can be achieved, demonstrating the utility of our proposed approach.