An Analysis of Query Reformulation Techniques for Precision Medicine

The Precision Medicine (PM) track at the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) focuses on providing useful precision medicine-related information to clinicians treating cancer patients. The PM track gives the unique opportunity to evaluate medical IR systems using the same set of topics on two different collections: scientific literature and clinical trials. In the paper, we take advantage of this opportunity and we propose and evaluate state-of-the-art query expansion and reduction techniques to identify whether a particular approach can be helpful in both scientific literature and clinical trials retrieval. We present those approaches that are consistently effective in both TREC editions and we compare the obtained results with the best performing runs submitted to TREC PM 2017 and 2018.