UCM at TREC 2012: Does Negation Influence The Retrieval of Medical Reports?

This paper details the UCM participation in the TREC 2012 Medical Records Track. We present several experiments directed to evaluate the effect of detecting negation in the task of retrieving medical reports. In particular, two different algorithms based on syntactic analysis have been applied to detect negations and to infer their scope. These algorithms are then combined with a simple term-frequency approach using Lucene to retrieve the reports that are relevant to a given query. We evaluate whether ignoring the information that is within the scope of negation may result in a higher retrieving performance. However, our experiments reveal that the effect of negation in this task is not significant.