Expansion of multi-word terms for indexing and retrieval using morphology and syntax

Abstract

A system for the automatic production of controlled index terms is presented using linguistically-motivated techniques. This includes a finite-state part of speech tagger, a derivational morphological processor for analysis and generation, and a unification-based shallow-level parser using transformational rules over syntactic patterns. The contribution of this research is the successful combination of parsing over a seed term list coupled with derivational morphology to achieve greater coverage of multi-word terms for indexing and retrieval. Final results are evaluated for precision and recall, and implications for indexing and retrieval are discussed.