Positional language models for clinical information retrieval

The PECO framework is a knowledge representation for formulating clinical questions. Queries are decomposed into four aspects, which are Patient-Problem (P), Exposure (E), Comparison (C) and Outcome (O). However, no test collection is available to evaluate such framework in information retrieval. In this work, we first present the construction of a large test collection extracted from systematic literature reviews. We then describe an analysis of the distribution of PECO elements throughout the relevant documents and propose a language modeling approach that uses these distributions as a weighting strategy. In our experiments carried out on a collection of 1.5 million documents and 423 queries, our method was found to lead to an improvement of 28% in MAP and 50% in P@5, as compared to the state-of-the-art method.