Linguistically Motivated Descriptive Term Selection

A linguistically motivated approach to indexing, that is the provision of descriptive terms for texts of any kind, is presented and illustrated. The approach is designed to achieve good, i.e. accurate and flexible, indexing by identifying index term sources in the meaning representations built by a powerful general purpose analyser, and providing a range of text expressions constituting semantic and syntactic variants for each term concept. Indexing is seen as a legitimate form of shallow text processing, but one requiring serious semantically based language processing, particularly to obtain well-founded complex terms, which is the main objective of the project described. The type of indexing strategy described is further seen as having utility in a range of applications environments.