Enriching queries with user preferences in healthcare

•Enriching queries using user preferences increases Information Retrieval in healthcare domain.•Prioritizing user preferences improves service discovery.•Conditional preference network is employed to rank user preferences.

Query enrichment is a process of dynamically enhancing a user query based on her preferences and context in order to provide a personalized answer. The central idea is that different users may find different services relevant due to different preferences and contexts. In this paper, we present a preference model that combines user preferences, user context, domain knowledge to enrich the initial user query. We use CP-nets to rank the preferences using implicit and explicit user preferences and domain knowledge. We present some algorithms for preferential matching. We have implemented the proposed model as a prototype. The initial results look promising.