The large volumes of medical information available on the web may provide#R##N#answers for a wide range of users attempting to solve health-related problems.#R##N#While experts generally utilize reliable resources for diagnosis search#R##N#and professional development, novices utilize di
erent (social) web resources#R##N#to obtain information that helps them manage their health or the health of#R##N#people who they care for. A diverse number of related search topics address#R##N#clinical diagnosis, advice searching, information sharing, connecting with experts,#R##N#etc. This article focuses on the extent to which expertise can impact#R##N#clinical query formulation, document relevance assessment and retrieval performance#R##N#in the context of tailoring retrieval models and systems to experts#R##N#vs. non-experts. The results show that medical domain expertise 1) plays an#R##N#important role in the lexical representations of information needs; 2) significantly#R##N#infuences the perception of relevance even among users with similar#R##N#levels of expertise and 3) reinforces the idea that a single ground truth doesn't#R##N#exist, thereby leading to the variability of system rankings with respect to the#R##N#level of user's expertise. The findings of this study presents opportunities for#R##N#the design of personalized health-related IR systems, but also for providing#R##N#insights about the evaluation of such systems.
['Lynda Tamine', 'Cecile Chouquet']
On the impact of domain expertise on query formulation, relevance assessment and retrieval performance in clinical settings