Concept-based document readability in domain specific information retrieval.

Yan, Xin; Song, Dawei; Li, Xue

Abstract

Domain specific information retrieval has become in demand. Not only domain experts, but also average non-expert users are interested in searching domain specific (e.g., medical and health) information from online resources. However, a typical problem to average users is that the search results are always a mixture of documents with different levels of readability. Non-expert users may want to see documents with higher readability on the top of the list. Consequently the search results need to be re-ranked in a descending order of readability. It is often not practical for domain experts to manually label the readability of documents for large databases. Computational models of readability needs to be investigated. However, traditional readability formulas are designed for general purpose text and insufficient to deal with technical materials for domain specific information retrieval. More advanced algorithms such as textual coherence model are computationally expensive for re-ranking a large number of retrieved documents. In this paper, we propose an effective and computationally tractable concept-based model of text readability. In addition to textual genres of a document, our model also takes into account domain specific knowledge, i.e., how the domain-specific concepts contained in the document affect the document's readability. Three major readability formulas are proposed and applied to health and medical information retrieval. Experimental results show that our proposed readability formulas lead to remarkable improvements in terms of correlation with users' readability ratings over four traditional readability measures.

Citation

YAN, X., SONG, D. and LI, X. 2006. Concept-based document readability in domain specific information retrieval. In Proceedings of the 15th Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) international conference on information and knowledge management (CIKM'06), 5-11 November 2006, Arlington, USA. New York: ACM [online], pages 540-549. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1145/1183614.1183692

• Conference Name: 15th Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) international conference on information and knowledge management (CIKM'06)
• Conference Location: Arlington, USA
• Start Date: Nov 5, 2006
• End Date: Nov 11, 2006
• Acceptance Date: Dec 31, 2006
• Online Publication Date: Dec 31, 2006
• Publication Date: Dec 31, 2006
• Deposit Date: May 12, 2009
• Publicly Available Date: May 12, 2009
• Publisher: ACM Association for Computing Machinery
• Pages: 540-549
• ISBN: 1595934332; 9781595934338
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/1183614.1183692
• Keywords: Document ranking; Document readability; Document scope and cohesion; Readability; Readability formula; Coherence
• Public URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10059/336