American Petroleum Institute's Machine-Aided Indexing Indexing and Searching Project

Abstract

Because of the high cost of controlled indexing of bibliographic information, the American Petroleum Institue's Central Abstracting and Indexing Service (CAIS) has desinged an expert-like system to take advantage of the 20 years of experienced indexing using keywords from its Thesauraus. It is expected that successful development of the automated indexing system could lead to a friendly system for the ultimate end-user utilizing controlled keywords. In the development stage, the natural language keywords of the abstracts of papers are compared with the keywords chosen by the indexers and rules for cross references are added to improve the machine indexing. Noise is eliminated by additional rules. The system is designed so that the copmuter will convert words in an abstract to controlled keywords of the Thesaurus to such an accurate extent that the output need only be edited in order to achieve the quality of manual indexing. It is hoped that a user's query words may then also be converted to controlled ke...