“Similar query was answered earlier”: processing of patient authored text for retrieving relevant contents from health discussion forum

Online remedy finders and health-related discussion forums have become increasingly popular in recent years. Common web users write their health problems there and request suggestion from experts or other users. As a result, these forums became a huge repository of information and discussions on various health issues. An intelligent information retrieval system can help to utilize this repository in various applications. In this paper, we propose a system for the automatic identification of existing similar forum posts given a new post. The system is based on computing similarity between two patient authored texts. For computing the similarity between the current post and existing posts, the system uses a hybrid strategy based on template information, topic modelling, and latent semantic indexing. The system is tested using a set of real questions collected from a homeopathy forum namely abchomeopathy.com. The relevance of the posts retrieved by the system is evaluated by human experts. The evaluation results demonstrate that the precision of the system is 88.87%.