Skip Navigation
Lister Hill Center Home  

Search Tips
About the Lister Hill Center
Innovative Research
Publications and Lectures
Training and Employment
LHNCBC: Document Abstract
Year: 2007Adobe Acrobat Reader
Download Free Adobe Acrobat Reader
LHNCBC-2007-019
Essie: A Concept-based Search Engine for Structured BiomedicalText
Ide NC, Loane RF, Demner-Fushman D
J Am Med Inform Assoc 2007;14(3):253-263.
This article describes the algorithms implemented in the Essie search engine that is currently serving several Web sites at the National Library of Medicine. Essie is a phrase-based search engine with term and concept query expansion and probabilistic relevancy ranking. Essie's design is motivated by an observation that query terms are often conceptually related to terms in a document, without actually occurring in the document text. Essie's performance was evaluated using data and standard evaluation methods from the 2003 and 2006 Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) Genomics track. Essie was the best-performing search engine in the 2003 TREC Genomics track and achieved results comparable to those of the highest-ranking systems on the 2006 TREC Genomics track task. Essie shows that a judicious combination of exploiting document structure, phrase searching, and concept based query expansion is a useful approach for information retrieval in the biomedical domain.
PDF