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Resolving healthcare forum posts via similar thread retrieval

Authors:

Jason H. D. Cho,

Parikshit Sondhi,

Chengxiang Zhai,

Bruce R. SchatzAuthors Info & Claims

BCB '14: Proceedings of the 5th ACM Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Health Informatics

Pages 33 - 42

https://doi.org/10.1145/2649387.2649399

Published: 20 September 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Web communities such as healthcare web forums serve as popular platforms for users to get their complex medical queries resolved. A typical forum thread contains a query in its first post, and a discussion around it in subsequent posts. However many users do not receive satisfactory responses from other members in the community, leaving them dissatisfied. We propose to help these users by exploiting an existing collection of discussion threads.

Often many users suffer from the same medical condition and start multiple discussion threads on very similar queries. In this paper we develop and evaluate a plethora of specialized search methods that treat an entire unresolved forum post as a query, and retrieve forum threads discussing similar problems to help resolve it. The task is more challenging than a traditional document retrieval problem, since forum posts can contain a lot of irrelevant background information. The discussion threads to be retrieved are also quite different from traditional unstructured text documents. We evaluate our results on a dataset comprising over 350K discussion threads and show that our proposed methods outperform state of the art retrieval methods for the task. In particular, method based on non-uniform weighting of thread posts and semantic analysis of the query text perform quite well.

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Cited By

Cui LLee DAmigo ECastells PGonzalo JCarterette BCulpepper JKazai G(2022)KETCHProceedings of the 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3477495.3532008(492-501)Online publication date: 6-Jul-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3477495.3532008
Lin YChien SChen Y(2021)Posting Recommendations in Healthcare Q&A ForumsElectronics10.3390/electronics1003027810:3(278)Online publication date: 25-Jan-2021
https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10030278
De Croon RVan Houdt LHtun NŠtiglic GVanden Abeele VVerbert K(2021)Health Recommender Systems: Systematic ReviewJournal of Medical Internet Research10.2196/1803523:6(e18035)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2021
https://doi.org/10.2196/18035
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Resolving healthcare forum posts via similar thread retrieval
1. Information systems
  1. Information systems applications

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

BCB '14: Proceedings of the 5th ACM Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Health Informatics

September 2014

851 pages

ISBN:9781450328944

DOI:10.1145/2649387

General Chairs:
Pierre Baldi
University of California, Irvine
,
Wei Wang
University of California, Los Angeles

Copyright © 2014 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 20 September 2014

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BCB '14: ACM-BCB '14

September 20 - 23, 2014

California, Newport Beach

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Overall Acceptance Rate 254 of 885 submissions, 29%

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Cited By

Cui LLee DAmigo ECastells PGonzalo JCarterette BCulpepper JKazai G(2022)KETCHProceedings of the 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3477495.3532008(492-501)Online publication date: 6-Jul-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3477495.3532008
Lin YChien SChen Y(2021)Posting Recommendations in Healthcare Q&A ForumsElectronics10.3390/electronics1003027810:3(278)Online publication date: 25-Jan-2021
https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10030278
De Croon RVan Houdt LHtun NŠtiglic GVanden Abeele VVerbert K(2021)Health Recommender Systems: Systematic ReviewJournal of Medical Internet Research10.2196/1803523:6(e18035)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2021
https://doi.org/10.2196/18035
Weichselbraun ABrasoveanu AWaldvogel ROdoni F(2020)Harvest - An Open Source Toolkit for Extracting Posts and Post Metadata from Web Forums2020 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (WI-IAT)10.1109/WIIAT50758.2020.00065(438-444)Online publication date: Dec-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/WIIAT50758.2020.00065
Hoogeveen DWang LBaldwin TVerspoor K(2018)Web Forum Retrieval and Text AnalyticsFoundations and Trends in Information Retrieval10.1561/150000006212:1(1-163)Online publication date: 3-Jan-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1561/1500000062
Nakikj DMamykina LMandryk RHancock MPerry MCox A(2018)Lost in MigrationProceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3173574.3173720(1-14)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3173574.3173720
Trapp MSkowron MSchabus DKamps JKanoulas Ede Rijke MFang HYilmaz E(2017)Retrieving Compositional Documents Using Position-Sensitive Word Mover's DistanceProceedings of the ACM SIGIR International Conference on Theory of Information Retrieval10.1145/3121050.3121084(233-236)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3121050.3121084
Faisal CDaud AImran FRho S(2016)A novel framework for social web forums' thread ranking based on semantics and post quality featuresThe Journal of Supercomputing10.1007/s11227-016-1839-z72:11(4276-4295)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11227-016-1839-z
Carchiolo VLongheu AMalgeri M(2015)Personal Health Record feeding via Medical Forums2015 IEEE 19th International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design (CSCWD)10.1109/CSCWD.2015.7231031(632-636)Online publication date: May-2015
https://doi.org/10.1109/CSCWD.2015.7231031
Cho JLi YGirju RZhai C(2015)Recommending forum posts to designated expertsProceedings of the 2015 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data)10.1109/BigData.2015.7363810(659-666)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/BigData.2015.7363810

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