SISA: Automatic indexing system for scientific articles. Experiments with location heuristics rules versus TF-IDF rules

Abstract

Indexing is contextualized and a brief description is provided of some of the most used automatic indexing systems. We describe SISA, a system which uses location heuristics rules, statistical rules like term frequency (TF) or TF-IDF to obtain automatic or semi-automatic indexing, depending on the user’s preference. The aim of this research is to ascertain which rules (location heuristics rules or TF-IDF rules) provide the best indexing terms. SISA is used to obtain the automatic indexing of 200 scientific articles on fruit growing written in Portuguese. It uses, on the one hand, location heuristics rules founded on the value of certain parts of the articles for indexing such as titles, abstracts, keywords, headings, first paragraph, conclusions and references and, on the other, TF-IDF rules. The indexing is then evaluated to ascertain retrieval performance through recall, precision and f-measure. Automatic indexing of the articles with location heuristics rules provided the best results with the evaluation measures.