A study on use of the web for automatic answering of remedy finding questions of common users

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Prakash, Amit | Saha, Sujan Kumar^*

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Birla Institute of Technology Mesra, Ranchi, India

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author: Sujan Kumar Saha, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Birla Institute of Technology Mesra, Ranchi, India. E-mail: [email protected].

Abstract: BACKGROUND: The World Wide Web has become a huge repository of knowledge in many domains, including health problems and remedy. An intelligent system, having the capability of mining the relevant information from the web, can provide instant guidance in our basic health problems. OBJECTIVE: The first objective is to convert the free-form long user query into a structured summary. The second objective is to provide an advice for a health query posed by a user. The suggestion can be in the form of names of medicines and related information or a warning to indicate that the situation is a medical emergency. METHODS: First, a set of template information is extracted from the user question. A search query is formed to retrieve relevant pages from a set of trusted websites. The retrieved pages are processed in various levels to extract the remedy and related information. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: The system is tested using a set of real questions collected from various relevant websites. The system generated suggestions are evaluated by experts. Evaluation results show that the system provides relevant results in 92.92% cases.

Keywords: E-health, online remedy finding, medical informatics applications, health information management, natural language processing

DOI: 10.3233/THC-181382

Journal: Technology and Health Care, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 23-35, 2019