CHIS@FIRE: Overview of the Shared Task on Consumer Health Information Search

People are increasingly turning to the World Wide Web to find answers for their health and lifestyle queries, While search engines are effective in answering direct factual questions such as ‘What are the symptoms of a disease X?’, they are not so effective in addressing complex consumer health queries, which do not have a single definitive answer, such as ‘Is treatment X effective for disease Y?’. Instead, the users are presented with a vast number of search results with often contradictory perspectives and no definitive conclusion. The term “Consumer Health Information Search” (CHIS) is used to denote such information retrieval search tasks, for which there is “No Single Best Correct Answer”. The proposed CHIS track aims to investigate complex health information search in scenarios where users search for health information with more than just a single correct answer, and look for multiple perspectives from diverse sources both from medical research and from real world patient narratives.