Abstract
The World Health Organization (WHO) has classified radon as a type 1 carcinogen and scientific evidence proves that indoor radon exposure is the leading cause of lung cancer in non-smokers and the second leading cause in smokers. Several studies rank the Internet as one of the most important sources of health-related information and highlight its ability to motivate behavioral changes to reduce the potential health effects associated with a risk. The objective of this research is to analyze the relevance of radon-related results when users submit certain information needs to search engines. This study is conducted by a multidisciplinary team (journalism-communication-computer science) that allows approaching this research from different perspectives and methodologies. To carry out this analysis, we ran the radon-related searches against a large web corpus (C4). This is a colossal, cleaned version of Common Crawl’s web crawl corpus. We indexed this web collection and, next, searched for webpages relevant to 51 radon-related information needs. Given the retrieved webpages, we employed Deep Linguistic technologies to extract the passages that are the most related to the information need. A set of relevance assessment guidelines were then defined and the passages were tagged (non-relevant, relevant and highly relevant) by three different assessors. The obtained results highlight the difficulty of finding information on the Internet that is either relevant or highly relevant to users’ information needs about radon gas. This is the first study of its kind on radon information on the Internet, allowing further in-depth research in this field.
Presenters
Noel Pascual PresaPhD student, Grupo Novos Medios, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Spain Lucía Ortigueira Piñeiro
Investigación, Comunicación, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Spain Noemi Fernández Folgueira
Student, Grado en Periodismo, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, A Coruña, Spain David Losada
Professor, Universidade Santiago de Compostela, Spain Berta García Orosa
Full, Ciencias de la Comunicación, Professor, University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, Spain Marcos Fernández Pichel
PhD Student, Electronics and Computation, University of Santiago de Compostela, A Coruña, Spain
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Health Information, Internet, Search Results, Radon, Deep Linguistic technologies
Digital Media
This presenter hasn’t added media.
Request media and follow this presentation.
