Text Information Management System (TIMS) MCQs With Answer

Text Information Management System (TIMS) MCQs With Answer

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Text Information Management System (TIMS) MCQs With Answer

Timely access to accurate text-based data is essential in pharmacy practice and research. A Text Information Management System (TIMS) organizes, indexes, retrieves, and analyzes clinical notes, regulatory documents, scientific literature, and drug monographs to support B. Pharm students and professionals. These TIMS MCQs cover architecture, indexing methods (inverted index, metadata), text preprocessing (tokenization, stemming, stop-word removal), NLP techniques (named entity recognition, TF–IDF, semantic search), database integration, security and compliance, and real-world applications such as pharmacovigilance, literature review, and decision support. Questions emphasize practical understanding, search strategies, and quality metrics (precision, recall). ‘Now let’s test your knowledge with 30 MCQs on this topic.’

Q1. What is the primary purpose of a Text Information Management System (TIMS) in pharmacy?

  • To manufacture pharmaceutical products
  • To organize, index, retrieve, and analyze text-based drug and clinical information
  • To monitor temperature in drug storage facilities
  • To perform chemical synthesis simulations

Correct Answer: To organize, index, retrieve, and analyze text-based drug and clinical information

Q2. Which data structure is most commonly used in TIMS to enable fast full-text search?

  • B-tree index
  • Relational join table
  • Inverted index
  • Hash chain

Correct Answer: Inverted index

Q3. In TIMS, which of the following is considered metadata for a document?

  • Body text of a clinical note
  • Scanned image pixels
  • Title, author, and publication date
  • Character encoding scheme

Correct Answer: Title, author, and publication date

Q4. What does tokenization refer to in text preprocessing?

  • Removing duplicate documents from a corpus
  • Splitting text into meaningful units such as words or phrases
  • Encrypting text for secure storage
  • Mapping synonyms to a single concept

Correct Answer: Splitting text into meaningful units such as words or phrases

Q5. Why are stop-word removal and filtering important in TIMS text processing?

  • They increase file sizes for better archiving
  • They remove high-frequency, low-significance words to reduce noise and index size
  • They translate documents into other languages
  • They identify authorship of documents

Correct Answer: They remove high-frequency, low-significance words to reduce noise and index size

Q6. How does stemming differ from lemmatization?

  • Stemming uses dictionaries; lemmatization trims suffixes heuristically
  • Stemming trims words to base stems heuristically; lemmatization returns dictionary-based lemmas considering context
  • Stemming detects entities; lemmatization tokenizes text
  • Stemming encodes documents; lemmatization compresses them

Correct Answer: Stemming trims words to base stems heuristically; lemmatization returns dictionary-based lemmas considering context

Q7. What does TF–IDF measure in document scoring?

  • Transaction frequency over indexed data
  • Term frequency adjusted by inverse document frequency to weight discriminative terms
  • Total field indexing depth factor
  • Time factor for document freshness

Correct Answer: Term frequency adjusted by inverse document frequency to weight discriminative terms

Q8. Which similarity metric is commonly used with vector-space models to compare document vectors?

  • Euclidean distance without normalization
  • Cosine similarity
  • Hamming distance
  • Manhattan distance

Correct Answer: Cosine similarity

Q9. Named Entity Recognition (NER) in a TIMS for pharmacy is primarily used to identify which items?

  • Operating system versions
  • Drug names, dosages, adverse events, and patient identifiers
  • Network traffic patterns
  • File compression algorithms

Correct Answer: Drug names, dosages, adverse events, and patient identifiers

Q10. When processing scanned drug labels or handwritten prescriptions, which TIMS component is essential?

  • Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
  • Relational normalization
  • Term frequency filtering
  • Part-of-speech tagging

Correct Answer: Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Q11. Which controlled vocabulary is commonly used to index biomedical literature relevant to pharmacy?

  • DICOM
  • MeSH (Medical Subject Headings)
  • JPEG
  • ISO 9001

Correct Answer: MeSH (Medical Subject Headings)

Q12. How can TIMS support pharmacovigilance activities?

  • By manufacturing generic drugs
  • By automatically detecting and aggregating mentions of adverse drug reactions from literature and reports
  • By controlling HVAC systems in pharmacies
  • By replacing clinical trials

Correct Answer: By automatically detecting and aggregating mentions of adverse drug reactions from literature and reports

Q13. The inverted index maps which elements to which?

  • Documents to users
  • Terms to lists of documents and positions where they occur
  • Authors to their affiliations
  • Files to server locations

Correct Answer: Terms to lists of documents and positions where they occur

Q14. In information retrieval, what is precision?

  • The total number of indexed terms
  • The proportion of retrieved documents that are relevant
  • The proportion of relevant documents retrieved out of all relevant documents
  • The time taken to return the first result

Correct Answer: The proportion of retrieved documents that are relevant

Q15. What does the F1 score represent in TIMS evaluation?

  • The ratio of index size to corpus size
  • The harmonic mean of precision and recall
  • The sum of precision and recall
  • The average document retrieval time

Correct Answer: The harmonic mean of precision and recall

Q16. Which query type allows combining terms with AND, OR, and NOT operators?

  • Fuzzy search
  • Boolean query
  • Vector-ranked query
  • Semantic embedding lookup

Correct Answer: Boolean query

Q17. Faceted search in TIMS is most useful for what purpose?

  • Encrypting search results
  • Filtering search results using structured metadata like year, drug class, or study type
  • Automatically translating abstracts
  • Generating synthetic clinical data

Correct Answer: Filtering search results using structured metadata like year, drug class, or study type

Q18. Which ranking function is widely used to compute document relevance in modern search engines and TIMS?

  • BM25
  • K-means clustering
  • PageRank for documents only
  • Levenshtein distance ranking

Correct Answer: BM25

Q19. What is concept normalization in TIMS?

  • Converting all PDFs to plain text
  • Mapping different surface forms and synonyms to a canonical medical concept or identifier
  • Compressing documents to save space
  • Translating concepts into multiple languages

Correct Answer: Mapping different surface forms and synonyms to a canonical medical concept or identifier

Q20. Which approach is typically used to group similar documents without labeled training data?

  • Supervised classification
  • Unsupervised clustering
  • Rule-based extraction with gold labels
  • Cross-validation labeling

Correct Answer: Unsupervised clustering

Q21. Supervised document classification in TIMS requires what key resource?

  • A large unlabeled corpus
  • Manually labeled training examples for each target category
  • Only metadata fields
  • Encrypted storage

Correct Answer: Manually labeled training examples for each target category

Q22. Which terminology standard focuses on normalized drug names and codes useful in TIMS integration?

  • SNOMED CT
  • RxNorm
  • ICD-10
  • DICOM

Correct Answer: RxNorm

Q23. Why is an audit trail important in TIMS for pharmacy applications?

  • It speeds up searches
  • It records user actions and access to support compliance and traceability
  • It translates documents to plain language
  • It removes duplicate documents automatically

Correct Answer: It records user actions and access to support compliance and traceability

Q24. Which security measure protects TIMS data both at rest and during transmission?

  • Tokenization only for search queries
  • Encryption using strong algorithms for stored data and TLS for transit
  • Compression to reduce file size
  • Stemming of sensitive fields

Correct Answer: Encryption using strong algorithms for stored data and TLS for transit

Q25. For integrating TIMS with external literature databases and EHRs, which interface style is commonly used?

  • RESTful APIs with JSON or XML payloads
  • FTP file dumps only
  • Local hard-drive sharing only
  • Manual export/import of paper files

Correct Answer: RESTful APIs with JSON or XML payloads

Q26. Which structured data format is commonly used in clinical document exchange standards like HL7 CDA?

  • CSV only
  • Binary blobs
  • XML
  • Plain text without tags

Correct Answer: XML

Q27. What advantage does full-text indexing provide over metadata-only indexing in TIMS?

  • Lower storage requirements
  • Ability to search within the body of documents for terms, phrases, and context
  • Faster metadata updates
  • Eliminates the need for security controls

Correct Answer: Ability to search within the body of documents for terms, phrases, and context

Q28. Record deduplication in TIMS is important because:

  • It reduces the number of users
  • It ensures a single canonical record per document or citation, improving result quality and analytics
  • It increases data redundancy
  • It obfuscates provenance

Correct Answer: It ensures a single canonical record per document or citation, improving result quality and analytics

Q29. In the TF–IDF formula, what does TF represent?

  • Term frequency — how often a term appears in a document
  • Token form — the canonical lemma of a word
  • Time factor — document age
  • Text format — encoding standard

Correct Answer: Term frequency — how often a term appears in a document

Q30. Which evaluation metric is commonly used to assess ranked retrieval effectiveness in TIMS?

  • Mean Squared Error (MSE)
  • Mean Average Precision (MAP)
  • Confusion matrix only
  • Throughput per second

Correct Answer: Mean Average Precision (MAP)

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