Medical Retrieval using Structured Information Extracted from Knowledge Bases

We investigate how semantic relations between concepts extracted from medical documents, and linked to a reference knowledge base, can be employed to improve the retrieval of medical literature. Semantic relations explicitly represent relatedness between concepts and carry high informative power that can be leveraged to improve the effectiveness of the retrieval. We present preliminary results and show how relations are able to provide a sizable increase of the precision for several topics, albeit having no impact on others. We then discuss some future directions to minimize the impact of negative results while maximizing the impact of good results.