Fighting for Equal Rights

ABSTRACT
Search queries on biomedical databases, such as Pubmed, often return a large number of results, only a small subset of which is relevant to the user. Ranking and categorization, which can also be combined, have been proposed to alleviate this information overload problem. Results categorization for biomedical databases is the focus of this work. A natural way to organize biomedical citations is according to their MeSH annotations.
MeSH is a comprehensive concept hierarchy used by PubMed. In this paper, we present the BioNav system, a novel search interface that enables the user to navigate large number of query results by organizing them using the MeSH concept hierarchy. First, the query results are organized into a navigation tree. At each node expansion step, BioNav reveals only a small subset of the concept nodes, selected such that the expected user navigation cost is minimized. In contrast, previous works expand the hierarchy in a predefined static manner, without navigation cost modelling.
We show that the problem of selecting the best concepts to reveal at each node expansion is NP-complete and propose an efficient heuristic as well as a feasible optimal algorithm for relatively small trees. We show experimentally that BioNav outperforms state-of-the-art categorization systems with respect to the user navigation cost. Hence, in this it is complementary to these systems, since it can be used to optimize the navigation, after these systems construct the navigation tree. Once the hierarchy is inferred, they follow a static navigation method. It is distinct since it offers dynamic navigation on a predefined hierarchy, as is the MeSH concept hierarchy.
First, they group the search results into separate categories. Each category is assigned a descriptive label examining which the user can determine whether the category is relevant or not; she can then click on (i.e., explore) just the relevant categories and ignore the remaining ones. Second, they...