Health Card Retrieval for Consumer Health Search: An Empirical Investigation of Methods

This paper investigates methods to rank health cards, a domain-specific type of entity cards, for consumer health search (CHS) queries. A key challenge in this context is which card(s) should be presented to the user. In particular, little evidence exists to determine the effectiveness of retrieval and ranking methods for health cards in CHS. CHS is a challenging domain, where users lack domain expertise and thus are often unable to formulate effective queries, and to interpret the retrieved results. In addition, unlike in other contexts, CHS presents the opportunity to exploit a number of domain specific characteristics and features. In this paper, we focus on difficult queries with self-diagnosis intents. Our study makes the following contributions: (1) it assembles and releases the first test collection of health cards for research purposes, and (2) it empirically evaluates a large range of entity retrieval methods adapted to health cards retrieval, including features specific to health cards for learning to rank. This is the first study that thoroughly investigates methods to rank health cards.