A Neural Network Approach Implementing Non-Linear Relevance Feedback to Improve the Performance of Medical Information Retrieval Systems

Abstract

In this chapter, a non-linear relevance feedback mechanism is proposed for increasing the performance and the reliability of information (medical content) retrieval systems. In greater detail, the user who searches for information is considered to be part of the retrieval process in an interactive framework, who evaluates the results provided by the system so that the user automatically updates its performance based on the users’ feedback. In order to achieve the latter, we propose an adaptively trained neural network (NN) architecture that is able to implement the non- linear feedback. The term “adaptively” refers to the functionality of the neural network to update its weights based on the user’s content selection and optimize its performance.