ABSTRACT
Because of the high cost of controlled indexing of bibliographic information, the American Petroleum Institute’s Central Abstracting and Indexing Service (CAIS) has designed an expert-like system to take advantage of the 20 years of experienced indexing using keywords from its Thesaurus. 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 computer 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 keywords of the Thesaurus so that search strategies of the ultimate end-users can be enhanced.
