A Post-Analysis of Query Reformulation Methods for Clinical Trials Retrieval

The Precision Medicine (PM) track of the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) focuses on providing useful precision medicine information to clinicians treating cancer patients. The PM track gives the unique opportunity to evaluate medical IR systems on two different collections: scientific literature and clinical trials. In this paper, we evaluate several state-of-the-art query expansion and reduction methods to see
whether a particular approach can be helpful in clinical trials retrieval. We present those approaches that are consistently effective in all three TREC PM editions and we compare them to the results obtained by the research groups who participated in all three editions.