
November 16, 2010
Medical
websites like WebMD provide consumers with more access than ever before to
comprehensive health and medical information, but the sites’ utility becomes
limited if users use unclear or unorthodox language to describe conditions in a
site search. However, a group of Georgia Tech researchers have created a machine-learning
model that enables the sites to “learn” dialect and other medical vernacular,
thereby improving their performance for users who use such language themselves.