A Methodology for Automated Descriptor Assignment (Research‪)‬

Abstract :Subject analysis is one of the most important activities carried out by information scientists, librarians, cataloguers and indexers. Determining the intellectual content of a document, and then assigning proper subject headings or descriptors to it, is crucial for the organization of information and knowledge. Libraries and information centers may hire a large number of cataloguers and indexers to perform these activities, increasing the costs of information processing and organization. For these reasons, and in order to lower the time and costs involved in these tasks, there have been many attempts for performing them without human intervention; that is, with the aid of a computer. The objective of this paper is, then, to present a methodology for the automated assignment of descriptors to documents, more specifically, to journal articles which contain an abstract and have been select for inclusion in a commercial database. Key words: Descriptor assignment, thesaurus-based indexing, subject analysis