A Graph-Based Analysis of Medical Queries of a Swedish Health Care Portal
Paper in proceeding, 2014

Today web portals play an increasingly important role in health care allowing information seekers to learn about diseases and treatments, and to administrate their care. Therefore, it is important that the portals are able to support this process as well as possible. In this paper, we study the search logs of a public Swedish health portal to address the questions if health information seeking differs from other types of Internet search and if there is a potential for utilizing network analysis methods in combination with semantic annotation to gain insights into search behaviors. Using a semantic-based method and a graph-based analysis of word cooccurrences in queries, we show there is an overlap among the results indicating a potential role of these types of methods to gain insights and facilitate improved information search. In addition we show that samples, windows of a month, of search logs may be sufficient to obtain similar results as using larger windows. We also show that medical queries share the same structural properties found for other types of information searches, thereby indicating an ability to reuse existing analysis methods for this type of search data.

Author

Farnaz Moradi

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Networks and Systems (Chalmers)

Ann-Marie Eklund

University of Gothenburg

Dimitrios Kokkinakis

University of Gothenburg

Tomas Olovsson

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Networks and Systems (Chalmers)

Philippas Tsigas

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Networks and Systems (Chalmers)

Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Health Text Mining and Information Analysis

2-10
978-1-937284-90-9 (ISBN)

5th International Workshop on Health Text Mining and Information Analysis, Louhi 2014 at the 14th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, EACL 2014
Göteborg, Sweden,

Subject Categories

Computer Science

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11/26/2021