Natural Language Search Interfaces: Health Data Needs Single-Field Variable Search

Journal of Medical Internet Research
Caroline JayIain Buchan

Abstract

Data discovery, particularly the discovery of key variables and their inter-relationships, is key to secondary data analysis, and in-turn, the evolving field of data science. Interface designers have presumed that their users are domain experts, and so they have provided complex interfaces to support these "experts." Such interfaces hark back to a time when searches needed to be accurate first time as there was a high computational cost associated with each search. Our work is part of a governmental research initiative between the medical and social research funding bodies to improve the use of social data in medical research. The cross-disciplinary nature of data science can make no assumptions regarding the domain expertise of a particular scientist, whose interests may intersect multiple domains. Here we consider the common requirement for scientists to seek archived data for secondary analysis. This has more in common with search needs of the "Google generation" than with their single-domain, single-tool forebears. Our study compares a Google-like interface with traditional ways of searching for noncomplex health data in a data archive. Two user interfaces are evaluated for the same set of tasks in extracting data from surv...Continue Reading

References

Nov 1, 2003·Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers : a Journal of the Psychonomic Society, Inc·Laura Faulkner
Nov 18, 2009·Journal of Medical Internet Research·Richard PakJason Thatcher
Jun 23, 2010·Health Information and Libraries Journal·Hannah Spring

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Citations

Dec 23, 2017·Telemedicine Journal and E-health : the Official Journal of the American Telemedicine Association·Amrin KhanderKatherine T Chen

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Software Mentioned

Ask
Google Generation
Bing
Traditional Search
EUROSTAT
Science Code Manifesto
Web Search
Rand
Casweb
ESDS

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