Medical document information retrieval through active user interfaces

This paper reports our preliminary design and implementation towards the development of Kavanah, a system to help users retrieve information and discover knowledge for a medical domain application. The goal of this system is to adaptively react to the dynamic changes in the user's interests and preferences in searching for information,within the context of the on-going information retrieval task. The context in which the user seeks information is modeled by an active user interface through analyzing the user's interactions with the system to dynamically construct an ontology of concepts representing the user's information seeking context. We implement the system using Unified Medical Language System knowledge base as a test bed.