CLEF 2017 Task overview: The IR Task at the eHealth Evaluation Lab evaluating retrieval methods for consumer Health search

This paper provides an overview of the information retrieval (IR) Task of the CLEF 2017 eHealth Evaluation Lab. This task investigates the effectiveness of web search engines in providing access to medical information for common people that have no or little medical knowledge (health consumers). The task aims to foster advances in the development of search technologies for consumer health search by providing resources and evaluation methods to test and validate search systems. The problem considered in this year's task was to retrieve web pages to support the information needs of health consumers that are faced with a medical condition and that want to seek relevant health information online through a search engine. The task re-used the 2016 topics, to deepen the assessment pool and create a more comprehensive and reusable collection. The task had four sub-tasks: ad-hoc search, personalized search, query variations, and multilingual ad-hoc search. Seven teams participated in the task; relevance assessment is underway and assessments along with the participants results will be released at the CLEF 2017 conference. Resources for this task, including topics, assessments, evaluation scripts and participant runs are available at the task's GitHub repository: https://github.com/CLEFeHealth/CLEFeHealth2017IRtask/