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Purpose The purpose of this study is to propose a framework for extracting medical information from the Web using domain ontologies. Patient–Doctor conversations have become prevalent on the Web. For instance, solutions like HealthTap or AskTheDoctors allow patients to ask doctors health-related questions. However, most online health-care consumers still struggle to express their questions efficiently due mainly to the expert/layman language and knowledge discrepancy. Extracting information from these layman descriptions, which typically lack expert terminology, is challenging. This hinders the efficiency of the underlying applications such as information retrieval. Herein, an ontology-driven approach is proposed, which aims at extracting information from such sparse descriptions using a meta-model. Design/methodology/approach A meta-model is designed to bridge the gap between the vocabulary of the medical experts and the consumers of the health services. The meta-model is mapped with SNOMED-CT to access the comprehensive medical vocabulary, as well as with WordNet to improve the coverage of layman terms during information extraction. To assess the potential of the approach, an information extraction prototype based on syntactical patterns is implemented. Findings The evaluation of the approach on the gold standard corpus defined in Task1 of ShARe CLEF 2013 showed promising results, an F-score of 0.79 for recognizing medical concepts in real-life medical documents. Originality/value The originality of the proposed approach lies in the way information is extracted. The context defined through a meta-model proved to be efficient for the task of information extraction, especially from layman descriptions.

This paper deals with an approach for an automated evaluation of the learners' state of knowledge when learning by doing. This approach is called ODALA for "Ontology-Driven Auto-evaluation for e-Learning Approach". It takes place in the context of Computer Based Human Learning Environment (CBHLE) in a self-learning by doing mode. ODALA is based on the teaching domain ontology and on errors classification and detection. The evaluation process is composed of four stages: (1) form analysis of learner's solutions, (2) semantic analysis, (3) marking, and (4) updating of the learner's model. We bring the approach into play in the context of relational databases teaching: we present the results of the relational databases self-learning system (RDB-E-LEARN) development, where the main stages of our evaluation approach are implemented.

Generating adapted learning contents is one of the most important activity that can give the best progression of a learner. This is why research on personalization of learning is growing to get learning environments able to adapt the learning activities and contents to the learnerâ??s profile. This last contains information about knowledge, skills, behavior, of the learner, at a given time of the learning process and for given domains. This information, to be effective, must be collected directly from an evaluation module that the learning system will systematically integrate in particular with the learning by doing mode. After the satisfactory results of our research on teaching domain modeling and automated evaluation of learnerâ??s in the case of learning by doing exercises, we propose in this paper the ODALA+ approach which is an extension of the already proposed approach called ODALA (Ontology Driven Auto-evaluation Learning Approach) by adding two steps for learnerâ??s profile calculation using the evaluation results and for generating adapted exercises.