Transformer and Knowledge Based Siamese Models for Medical Document Retrieval

Abstract

Vocabulary mismatch is a significant issue when it comes to query-based document retrieval in the medical field. Since the documents are typically authored by professionals, they may contain many specialized terms that are not widely understood or used. Traditional information retrieval (IR) models like vector space and best match-based models fail in this regard. Neural Learning to Rank (NLtR) and transformer models have attracted significant research attention in the field of IR. Recent works in the medical field utilize medical knowledge bases (KB) that map words to concepts and aid in connecting several words to the same concept. In this paper, we present various Siamese-structured transformer and knowledge-based retrieval models designed to address the retrieval issues in the medical domain. The experimental evaluation highlighted the superior performance of the proposed retrieval model, and the best one, based on the UMLSBert ENG transformer, achieved best-in-class performance with respect to all evaluation metrics. © 2023 IEEE.