Effective access to distributed heterogeneous medical text databases.

INQUERY is an advanced text information retrieval system developed by the Information Retrieval Laboratory of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. It is based on Bayesian inference networks, which are probabilistic models for reasoning with multiple sources of uncertain evidence. The evidence, in this case, is the presence or absence of words and/or phrases in a document. Evidence is combined into belief that a document is relevant. The INQUERY retrieval engine has been developed with the support of ARPA, NSF, and industrial funding. It has a number of unique features and has achieved excellent results in the TIPSTER and TREC evaluations. Informatics research and application development using INQUERY has recently begun in the medical domain, including a new ARPA initiative concerned with clinical text. The features that we will focus on in this demonstration are: Automatic processing of natural language queries, including the extraction of phrases and specific medical concepts such as drug doses; Document selection through automatic relevance feedback and routing techniques, including the construction of complex queries using the INQUERY query language; The integration of conventional database techniques with text analysis and retrieval; Automatic thesaurus generation and query expansion using the PhraseFinder system; Distributed database access, including automatic database selection and merging of local searches; this will be demonstrated using a collection of medical databases; Retrieval based on passages, rather than whole documents.