Conceptual Retrieval of Chinese Frequently Asked Healthcare Questions

Article history: Received 17 January 2015 Revised 31 March 2015 Accepted 3 April 2015 Given a query (a health question), retrieval of relevant frequently asked questions (FAQs) is essential as the FAQs provide both reliable and readable information to healthcare consumers. The retrieval requires the estimation of the semantic similarity between the query and each FAQ. The similarity estimation is challenging as semantic structures of Chinese healthcare FAQs are quite different from those of the FAQs in other domains. In this paper, we propose a conceptual model for Chinese healthcare FAQs, and based on the conceptual model, present a technique ECA that estimates conceptual similarities between FAQs. Empirical evaluation shows that ECA can help various kinds of retrievers to rank relevant FAQs significantly higher. We also make ECA online to provide services for FAQ retrievers.