Toward Effective Automated Weighted Subject Indexing: A Comparison of Different Approaches in Different Environments.

Subject indexing plays an important role in supporting subject access to information resources. Current subject indexing systems do not make adequate distinctions on the importance of assigned subject descriptors. Assigning numeric weights to subject descriptors to distinguish their importance to th...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology Vol. 69; no. 1; pp. 121 - 134
Main Authors: Kun Lu, Jin Mao, Gang Li
Format: equations & formulas research tables/charts Journal Article
Published: Wiley-Blackwell Jan2018
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
fields @attributes:
  recordID: 1
pdfLink:
plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ccm&AN=126974705&site=ehost-live
header:
  @attributes:
    shortDbName: ccm
    uiTerm: 126974705
    longDbName: CINAHL Complete
    uiTag: AN
  controlInfo:
    bkinfo:
    dissinfo:
    jinfo:
      jid:
        23301635
        H6JN
      jtl: Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology
      issn: 23301635
      maglogo: N
    pubinfo:
      dt: Jan2018
      vid: 69
      iid: 1
      pid: 480
      pub: Wiley-Blackwell
      place: Malden, Massachusetts
    artinfo:
      ui:
        126974705
        126974705
        126974705
        10.1002/asi.23912
        126974705
      ppf: 121
      ppct: 13
      formats:
      tig:
        atl: Toward Effective Automated Weighted Subject Indexing: A Comparison of Different Approaches in Different Environments.
      aug:
        au:
          Kun Lu
          Jin Mao
          Gang Li
        affil: School of Library and Information Studies, University of Oklahoma, 401 West Brooks, Norman, OK 73019, USA
      sug:
        subj:
          Abstracting and Indexing Methods
          Subject Headings
          Automation
          Human
          Medline
          Semantics
          Wilcoxon Rank Sum Test
          Funding Source
      ab: Subject indexing plays an important role in supporting subject access to information resources. Current subject indexing systems do not make adequate distinctions on the importance of assigned subject descriptors. Assigning numeric weights to subject descriptors to distinguish their importance to the documents can strengthen the role of subject metadata. Automated methods are more cost-effective. This study compares different automated weighting methods in different environments. Two evaluation methods were used to assess the performance. Experiments on three datasets in the biomedical domain suggest the performance of different weighting methods depends on whether it is an abstract or full text environment. Mutual information with bag-of-words representation shows the best average performance in the full text environment, while cosine with bag-of-words representation is the best in an abstract environment. The cosine measure has relatively consistent and robust performance. A direct weighting method, IDF (Inverse Document Frequency), can produce quick and reasonable estimates of the weights. Bag-of-words representation generally outperforms the concept-based representation. Further improvement in performance can be obtained by using the learning-to-rank method to integrate different weighting methods. This study follows up Lu and Mao (Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 66, 1776-1784, 2015), in which an automated weighted subject indexing method was proposed and validated. The findings from this study contribute to more effective weighted subject indexing.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype:
        equations & formulas
        research
        tables/charts
        Journal Article
      ougenre: Article
    language: English
    refInfo:
    holdings:
      @attributes:
        islocal: N