MedSearch is a retrieval system for the medical literature Angelos Hliaoutakis, Giannis Varelas, Euripides G.M. Petrakis, Evangelos Milios MedSearch is a retrieval system for the medical literature Medline: the premier bibliographic database of the U.S. NLM (15 million references) http://www.intelligence.tuc.gr/medsearch SSRM is the retrieval model of MedSearch Semantic Similarity Retrieval Model Computes the similarity between documents containing semantically similar terms Semantic Similarity: conceptual similarity between terms using MeSH Terms not necessarily lexicographically similar (“car” - “automobile”) Term Similarity: Map two terms to an ontology and compute their relationship in that ontology MeSH: ontology for medical and biological terms SSRM Algorithm: Input: Query q=(q1,q2,…qN), Document d=(d1,d2,…dN) Preprocessing: Queries and documents are initially assigned tfxidf weights Query term re-weighting similar terms reinforce each other Query expansion with synonyms and similar terms and term re-weighting Document similarity SSRM is evaluated through OHSUMED A standard TREC collection with 293,856 medical articles from MedLine Retrieval methods: SSRM (expansion T= 0.5, 0.9) Vector Space Model (VSM)