Automatically indexing documents: content vs. reference

ABSTRACT

Authors cite other work in many types of documents. Notable among these are research papers and web pages. Recently, several researchers have proposed using the text surrounding citations (references) as a means of automatically indexing documents for search engines, claiming that this technique is superior to indexing documents based on their content [1,2]. While we ourselves have made this claim, we acknowledge that little empirical data has been presented to support it. Therefore, in the limited space available we present a terse overview of a study comparing reference to content as bases for indexing documents. This study indicates that reference identifies the value of documents more accurately and with a greater diversity of language than content.

REFERENCES

• 1: Shannon Bradshaw , Andrei Scheinkman , Kristian Hammond, Guiding people to information: providing an interface to a digital library using reference as a basis for indexing, Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces, p.37-43, January 09-12, 2000, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States [doi>10.1145/325737.325774]
• 2: Sergey Brin , Lawrence Page, The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine, Proceedings of the seventh international conference on World Wide Web 7, p.107-117, April 1998, Brisbane, Australia
• 3: G. W. Furnas , T. K. Landauer , L. M. Gomez , S. T. Dumais, The vocabulary problem in human-system communication, Communications of the ACM, v.30 n.11, p.964-971, Nov. 1987 [doi>10.1145/32206.32212]
• 4: Steve Jones , Sally Jo Cunningham , Rodger McNab, Usage analysis of a digital library, Proceedings of the third ACM conference on Digital libraries, p.293-294, June 23-26, 1998, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States [doi>10.1145/276675.276739]
• 5: Steve Lawrence , C. Lee Giles , Kurt Bollacker, Digital Libraries and Autonomous Citation Indexing, Computer, v.32 n.6, p.67-71, June 1999 [doi>10.1109/2.769447]
• 6: Craig Silverstein , Hannes Marais , Monika Henzinger , Michael Moricz, Analysis of a very large web search engine query log, ACM SIGIR Forum, v.33 n.1, p.6-12, Fall 1999 [doi>10.1145/331403.331405]
• 7: Amanda Spink , Dietmar Wolfram , Major B. J. Jansen , Tefko Saracevic, Searching the Web: the public and their queries, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, v.52 n.3, p.226-234, Feb. 1, 2001 [doi>10.1002/1097-4571(2000)9999:9999<::AID-ASI1591>3.3.CO;2-I]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.1 Content Analysis and Indexing
          Subjects: Indexing methods

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.2 Design Tools and Techniques
          Subjects: User interfaces

  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.7 DOCUMENT AND TEXT PROCESSING
      I.7.5 Document Capture
          Subjects: Document analysis

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors, Performance, Theory

Keywords:
indexing precision, reference-based indexing, term diversity