Title: A text based drug query system for mobile phones

Authors: Akhil Langer; Rohit Banga; Ankush Mittal; L.V. Subramaniam; Parikshit Sondhi

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 201 N. Goodwin Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801, USA ' Master's Student at College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 1038 McMillan Street NW, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Graphic Era University, Dehradun 248 002, India ' Information Quality and Discovery, IBM Research, New Delhi 110 070, India ' Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 201 N. Goodwin Avenue, Urbana, IL, USA

Abstract: Dissemination of medical information using mobile phones is still in a nascent stage because of their limited features - lack of penetration of mobile internet, small screen size etc. We present the design of a drug QA system that could be used for providing information about medicines over short message service (SMS). We begin with a survey of the drug information domain and classify the drug related queries into a set of predefined classes. Our system uses several natural language processing tools coupled with machine learning classification techniques to process drug information related queries. We focus on developing a natural language interface allowing the user to be flexible in phrasing their queries and attain an accuracy of 81% in classifying the drug related questions. We conclude that it is feasible and cheap to deploy such a system to encourage the practice of evidence based medicine.

Keywords: mobile communications; text processing; question answering systems; e-healthcare; electronic healthcare; medical information; medicines; SMS; short message service; machine learning; drug query systems; mobile phones; cell phones; drug information; evidence based medicine.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMC.2014.063656

International Journal of Mobile Communications, 2014 Vol.12 No.4, pp.411 - 429

Published online: 30 Apr 2015 *

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