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“Similar query was answered earlier”: processing of patient authored text for retrieving relevant contents from health discussion forum

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Abstract

Online remedy finders and health-related discussion forums have become increasingly popular in recent years. Common web users write their health problems there and request suggestion from experts or other users. As a result, these forums became a huge repository of information and discussions on various health issues. An intelligent information retrieval system can help to utilize this repository in various applications. In this paper, we propose a system for the automatic identification of existing similar forum posts given a new post. The system is based on computing similarity between two patient authored texts. For computing the similarity between the current post and existing posts, the system uses a hybrid strategy based on template information, topic modelling, and latent semantic indexing. The system is tested using a set of real questions collected from a homeopathy forum namely abchomeopathy.com. The relevance of the posts retrieved by the system is evaluated by human experts. The evaluation results demonstrate that the precision of the system is 88.87%.

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Notes

  1. https://patient.info/forums.

  2. https://www.medhelp.org/forums/.

  3. https://forum.hpathy.com/forum/.

  4. https://abchomeopathy.com/forums.php.

  5. https://www.drhomeo.com/.

  6. http://nltk.org/.

  7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosine similarity.

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Funding

The authors declare that they have received no funding for the current study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Birla Institute of Technology Mesra, Ranchi, 835215, India

    Sujan Kumar Saha & Amit Prakash

  2. Department of Computer Science and Application, University of North Bengal, West Bengal, India

    Mukta Majumder

Authors
  1. Sujan Kumar Saha
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  2. Amit Prakash
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  3. Mukta Majumder
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Correspondence to Sujan Kumar Saha.

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Saha, S.K., Prakash, A. & Majumder, M. “Similar query was answered earlier”: processing of patient authored text for retrieving relevant contents from health discussion forum. Health Inf Sci Syst 7, 4 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13755-019-0067-3

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