Abstract
Summary
Due to the technical words employed, which are primarily recognized by medical specialists, information retrieval in the medical area is sometimes described as sophisticated. Because of this, users frequently have trouble coming up with queries utilizing these medical phrases. However, this problem may be readily fixed by an information retrieval system that finds the pertinent terms that fit the user's query and automatically creates a ranking document using these keywords. To enhance the IR performance, the Automatic Query expansion method is applied by appending additional query terms for the medical domain. We propose a novel fuzzy‐based Grasshopper Optimization Algorithm (GOA) based on automatic query expansion. This work is mainly focused on filtering the most relevant augmented query by utilizing the synchronization score of IR evidence like normalized term frequency, inverse document frequency, and normalization of document length. The main aim of this work is to identify the medical terms that appropriately match the user's queries. The GOA algorithm ranks the terms based on relevance and then identifies the terms with the maximum synchronization value. The documents formed using the optimal expanded query are classified into three types, namely totally relevant, moderately relevant, and marginally relevant. Besides, the comparison of the proposed work is carried out for different performance metrics like Mean‐Average Precision, F‐measure, Precision‐recall, and Precision rank are evaluated and analyzed by using TREC‐COVID, TREC Genomics 2007, and MEDLARs medical datasets for the proposed and some of the state‐of‐art works. For a total of 60 queries, the proposed model offers an F1‐Score of 0.964, 0.959, and 0.968 for the MEDLARS, TREC Genomics, and TREC COVID19 datasets, respectively. The E1‐score and Mean Reciprocal Rate (MRR) of the proposed model is 0.8 and 0.9 when evaluated using the TREC COVID19 dataset. Performance analyses show that the proposed approach outperforms the other automatic keyword expansion approaches in the medical domain.