The experimental results obtained by testing the main hypotheses indicated that there was no difference between the two indexing methods compared, indexing from an alphabetical list alone, and indexing with the suggestion lists as a supplement to the alphabetical list. (Author/MM)

Discussion of recall and precision of index terms focuses on an information-theoretic measure of term specificity. Term weighting schemes are described, including the inverse document frequency (IDF) and signal-noise ratio (S/N) approaches; term weighting by specificity is explained; and the need for experiments with test document collections is…

The Subject Access Project second quarterly report for September to December 1976 summarized in-progress work to improve subject access to monographs. Activities include: (1) analysis of book indexes and tables of contents for terms to augment MARC subject description; (2) analysis of additional book sections--e.g., maps, illustrations, charts,…

Discussion of text analysis and information retrieval and measurement of document similarity focuses on a new text manipulation system called FA (field association)-Sim that is useful for retrieving information in large heterogeneous texts and for recognizing content similarity in text excerpts. Discusses recall and precision, automatic indexing…

Describes the possible improvements in the quality of automatic indexing systems gained by using complex descriptors, and reports on the effectiveness of a simple nonsyntactic phrase indexing procedure. The discussion covers shortcomings of this approach, possible methods for improvement, and areas needing further research. (43 references) (CLB)

An indexer faces unique challenges when the genre consists of biographical material written for children. The narrative prose style demands vividly descriptive indexing terms, but the youthful audience requires a control of vocabulary and a clear, simple presentation. The literature of library and information science yields a few sources on the…

Proposes a model that assists in understanding indexing on the World Wide Web and presents an experiment assessing the validity of Inverse Document Frequency (IDF) as a term weighting strategy for Web documents. Findings indicate that IDF scores are not stable in the heterogeneous and dynamic context of the Web. (Author/AEF)

This review takes a critical approach in summarizing and evaluating the methodology and scope of catalog use studies, with emphasis on the subject approach to card catalog searching. Subject access is defined in this report; however, the process of subject searching, described repeatedly in library literature, has been based upon common sense…

Summarizes the experimental evidence that indicates that text indexing systems based on the assignment of appropriately weighted single terms produce retrieval results superior to those obtained with more elaborate text representations, and provides baseline single term indexing models with which more elaborate content analysis procedures can be…

Briefly reviews various methodologies for constructing enhanced document representations, discusses their general lack of usefulness, and describes a method of document indexing which uses title words taken from bibliographically related items. Evaluation of this process indicates that it is not sufficiently reliable to warrant incorporation into…