Using a Medical Thesaurus to Predict Query Difficulty

Estimating query performance is the task of predicting the quality of results returned by a search engine in response to a query. In this paper, we focus on pre-retrieval prediction methods for the medical domain. We propose a novel predictor that exploits a thesaurus to ascertain how difficult queries are. In our experiments, we show that our predictor outperforms the state-of-the-art methods that do not use a thesaurus.