Overcoming the linguistic divide: a barrier to consumer health information

Abstract: Seeking health information online has become very popular. Despite this popularity, health consumers face many barriers to successfully retrieving good quality health information. This paper reviews the literature on the linguistic divide between health consumers and consumer health information. Consumer health vocabularies (CHV) and natural language processing (NLP) show potential for bridging the divide, thereby improving recall and precision from information retrieval systems. Developers of digital libraries can incorporate CHV and (or) NLP as help tools to facilitate health consumers’ search success. Deeper issues, such as health consumers’ mental representation of medical domain, must also be addressed in future research for optimal benefit from such help tools.

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