Abstract: Academic collections, such as COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19), contain a large number of scholarly articles regarding COVID-19 and other related viruses. These articles represent the latest development in combating COVID-19 pandemic in various disciplines. However, it is difficult for laypeople to access these articles due to the term mismatch problem caused by their limited medical knowledge. In this article, we present an effort of helping laypeople to access the CORD-19 collection by translating and expanding laypeople’s keywords to their corresponding medical terminology using the National Library of Medicine’s Consumer Health Vocabulary. We then developed a retrieval system called Search engine for Laypeople to access the COVID-19 literature (SLAC) using open-source software. Utilizing Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s FAQ questions as the basis for developing common questions that laypeople could be interested in, we performed a set of experiments for testing the SLAC system and the translation and expansion (T&E) process. Our experiment results demonstrate that the T&E process indeed helped to overcome the term mismatch problem and mapped laypeople terms to the medical terms in the academic articles. But we also found that not all laypeople’s search topics are meaningful to search on the CORD-19 collection. This indicates the scope and the limitation of enabling laypeople to search on academic article collection for obtaining high-quality information.

Keywords: COVID-19, laypeople, information retrieval, consumer health vocabulary, translation and expansion process