Automatic indexing is the

computer A computer is a machine that can be programmed to Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as C ...

ized process of scanning large volumes of

documents A document is a writing, written, drawing, drawn, presented, or memorialized representation of thought, often the manifestation of nonfiction, non-fictional, as well as fictional, content. The word originates from the Latin ''Documentum'', w ...

against a

controlled vocabulary Control may refer to: Basic meanings Economics and business * Control (management), an element of management * Control, an element of management accounting * Comptroller (or controller), a senior financial officer in an organization * Controlling ...

taxonomy Taxonomy is the practice and science of categorization or classification. A taxonomy (or taxonomical classification) is a scheme of classification, especially a hierarchical classification, in which things are organized into groups or types. ...

thesaurus A thesaurus (plural ''thesauri'' or ''thesauruses'') or synonym dictionary is a reference work for finding synonyms and sometimes antonyms of words. They are often used by writers to help find the best word to express an idea: Synonym diction ...

ontology In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality. Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities exis ...

and using those controlled terms to quickly and effectively index large

electronic document An electronic document is any electronic media content (other than computer programs or system files) that is intended to be used in either an electronic form or as printed output. Originally, any computer data were considered as something inter ...

depositories. These keywords or language are applied by training a system on the rules that determine what words to match. There are additional parts to this such as syntax, usage, proximity, and other algorithms based on the system and what is required for indexing. This is taken into account using Boolean statements to gather and capture the indexing information out of the text. As the number of documents exponentially increases with the proliferation of the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

, automatic indexing will become essential to maintaining the ability to find relevant information in a sea of irrelevant

information Information is an abstract concept that refers to that which has the power to inform. At the most fundamental level information pertains to the interpretation of that which may be sensed. Any natural process that is not completely random ...

. Natural language systems are used to train a system based on seven different methods to help with this sea of irrelevant information. These methods are Morphological, Lexical, Syntactic, Numerical, Phraseological, Semantic, and Pragmatic. Each of these look and different parts of speed and terms to build a domain for the specific information that is being covered for indexing. This is used in the automated process of indexing. The automated process can encounter problems and these are primarily caused by two factors: 1) the complexity of the language; and, 2) the lack intuitiveness and the difficulty in extrapolating concepts out of statements on the part of the computing technology. These are primarily linguistic challenges and specific problems involve semantic and syntactic aspects of language. These problems occur based on defined keywords. With these keywords you are able to determine the accuracy of the system based on Hits, Misses, and Noise. These terms relate to exact matches, keywords that a computerized system missed that a human wouldn't, and keywords that the computer selected that a human would not have. The Accuracy statistic based on this should be above 85% for Hits out of 100% for human indexing. This puts Misses and Noise combined to be 15% or less. This scale provides a basis for what is considered a good Automatic Indexing System and shows where problems are being encountered.

History

There are scholars who cite that the subject of automatic indexing attracted attention as early as the 1950s, particularly with the demand for faster and more comprehensive access to scientific and engineering literature. This attention in indexing began with text processing between 1957 and 1959 by H.P. Lunh through a series of papers that were published. Lunh proposed that a computer could handle keyword matching, sorting, and content analysis. This was the beginning of Automatic Indexing and the formula to pull keywords from text based on frequency analysis. It was later determined that frequency alone was not sufficient for good descriptors however this began the path to where we are now with Automatic Indexing.Historical Note: The Past Thirty Years in Information Retrieval Salton, Gerard Journal of the American Society for Information Science (1986-1998); Sep 1987; 38, 5; ProQuest pg. 375 This was highlighted by the information explosion, which was predicted in the 1960s and came about through the emergence of information technology and the World Wide Web. The prediction was prepared by Mooers where an outline was created with the expected role that computing would have for text processing and information retrieval. This prediction said that machines would be used for storage of documents in large collections and that we would use these machines to run searches. Mooers also predicted the online aspect and retrieval environment for indexing databases. This led Mooers to predict an Induction Inference Machine which would revolutionize indexing. This phenomenon required the development of an indexing system that can cope with the challenge of storing and organizing vast amount of data and can facilitate information access. New electronic hardware further advanced automated indexing since it overcame the barrier imposed by old paper archives, allowing the encoding of information at the molecular level. With this new electronic hardware there were tools developed for assisting users. These were used to manage files and were organized into different categories such as PDM Suites like Outlook or Lotus Note and Mind Mapping Tools such as MindManager and Freemind. These allow users to focus on storage and building a cognitive model. The automatic indexing is also partly driven by the emergence of the field called

computational linguistics Computational linguistics is an Interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, comput ...

, which steered research that eventually produced techniques such as the application of computer analysis to the structure and meaning of languages. Automatic indexing is further spurred by research and development in the area of

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

and

self-organizing system Self-organization, also called spontaneous order in the social sciences, is a process where some form of overall order and disorder, order arises from local interactions between parts of an initially disordered system. The process can be spon ...

also referred to as thinking machine.

Medicine

Automatic Indexing has many practical applications like for instance in the field of medicine. In research published in 2009, researchers talk about how automatic indexing can be used to create an information portal where users can find out reliable information about a drug. CISMeF is one such health portal that is designed to give information about drugs. The website uses MeSH thesaurus to index the scientific articles of the MEDLINE database and the Dublin Core Metadata. The system creates a meta term drug and uses that as search criteria to find all information about a specific drug. The website uses simple and advanced search. The simple search allows you to search by a brand name or by any code given by the drugs. Advanced search allows a more specific search by allowing you enter everything that describes the drug you are looking for.

References

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History

Medicine

See also

References