Background: Ontology development, as an increasingly practical vehicle applied in various fields, plays a significant role in knowledge management. This paper, focusing on constructing and querying a hepatitis ontology, aims to provide a framework for ontology-based medical services. The paper is devoted to the algorithm of query expansion for the hepatitis ontology, including synonym expansion, hypernym/hyponym expansion and expansion of similar words. It applies semantic similarity calculation to judge the similarity of retrieval terms.
Results: The paper proposes a new prototype system. The accuracy of query expansion is improved in both precision@40 and AP@40, which indicates that query expansion improves the accuracy of the query after using the method proposed in this paper.
Conclusions: The paper has adopted semantic similarity computing to improve retrieval performance. Experiments show that search precision of query expansion is higher based on domain concept relationship.