Computer use of a medical dictionary to select search words

摘要

In a preceding experiment in text-searching retrieval for cancer questions, search words were humanly selected with the aid of a medical dictionary and cancer textbooks. Recall results were (1) using only stems of question words (humanly stemmed): 20%; (2) adding dictionary search words: 29%; (3) adding also textbook search words: 70%. For the experiment reported here, computer procedures for using the medical dictionary to select search words were developed. Recall results were (1) for question stems (computer stemmed): 19%; (2) adding search words computer selected from the dictionary: 24 %. Thus the computer procedures compared to human use of the dictionary were 50% successful. Human and computer false retrieval rates were almost equal. Some hypotheses about computer selection of search words from textbooks are also described.