Computer assisted indexing

Abstract

The paper describes a technique which enables an on line computer based information retrieval system to aid the indexers by selecting possible index terms to be assigned to a new document entering the system. The method analyses the index terms assigned to the references cited by the new article. This produces a list of index terms weighted according to their expected correlation with the subject matter of the new article. Thus, the indexer is presented with a weighted list of proposed indexing terms as an aid. An evaluation is made of the results produced by the technique for a trial set of documents. These documents have already been indexed for the MEDLARS system. The list of actual index terms for this trial set of documents is compared with the set of index terms proposed by the technique for each document. The results of this comparison are encouraging, and they are discussed in the paper. The economic aspects of implementing the technique in a working information retrieval system is considered. This includes the expected benefits, and an estimate of the actual cost of using the technique as an aid in terms of computer time and indexer time.