Thesaurus-based automatic book indexing

摘要

This paper describes a technique for automatic book indexing. The technique requires a dictionary of terms that are to appear in the index, along with all text strings that count as instances of the term. It also requires that the text be in a form suitable for processing by a text formatter. A program searches the text for each occurrence of a term or its associated strings and creates an entry to the index when either is found. The results of the experimental application to a portion of a book text are presented, including measures of precision and recall, with precision giving the ratio of terms correctly assigned in the automatic process to the total assigned, and recall giving the ratio of correct terms automatically assigned to the total number of term assignments according to a human standard. Results indicate that the technique can be applied successfully, especially for texts that employ a technical vocabulary and where there is a premium on indexing exhaustivity.