Evaluation of Meta-concepts for Information Retrieval in a Quality-controlled Health Gateway

Background: CISMeF is a French quality-controlled health gateway that uses the MeSH thesaurus. We introduced two new concepts, metaterms (medical specialty which has semantic links with one or more MeSH terms, subheadings and resource types) and resource types.

Objective: Evaluate precision and recall of metaterms.

Methods: We created 16 pairs of queries. Each pair concerned the same topic, but one used metaterms and one MeSH terms. To assess precision, each document retrieved by the query was classified as irrelevant, partly relevant or fully relevant.

Results: The 16 queries yielded 943 documents for metaterm queries and 139 for MeSH term queries. The recall of MeSH term queries was 0.44 (compared to 1 for metaterm queries) and the precision were identical for MeSH term and metaterm queries.

Conclusion: Metaconcept such as CISMeF metaterms allows a better recall with a similar precision that MeSH terms in a quality controlled health gateway.