User intent behind medical queries: an evaluation of entity mapping approaches with metamap and freebase

This work focuses on understanding the user intent in the medical domain. The combination of Semantic Web and information retrieval technologies promises a better comprehension of user intents. Mapping queries to entities using Freebase is not novel, but so far only one entity per query could be identified. We overcome this limitation using annotations provided by Metamap. Also, different approaches to map queries to Freebase are explored and evaluated. We propose an indirect evaluation of the mappings, through user intent defined by classes such as Symptoms, Diseases or Treatments. Our experiments show that by using the concepts annotated by Metamap it is possible to improve the accuracy and F1 performances of mappings from queries to Freebase entities.