Bilingual Machine-Aided Indexing

Abstract The proliferation of multilingual documentation in our Information Society has become a common phenomenon. This documentation is usually categorised by hand, entailing a time-consuming and arduous burden. This is particularly true in the case of keyword assignment, in which a list of keywords (descriptors) from a controlled vocabulary (thesaurus) is assigned to a document. A possible solution to alleviate this problem comes from the hand of the so-called Machine-Aided Indexing (MAI) systems. These systems work in cooperation with professional indexer by providing a initial list of descriptors from which those most appropiated will be selected. This way of proceeding increases the productivity and eases the task of indexers. In this paper, we propose a statistical text classification framework for bilingual documentation, from which we derive two novel bilingual classifiers based on the naive combination of monolingual classifiers. We report preliminary results on the multilingual corpus Acquis Communautaire (AC) that demonstrate the suitability of the proposed classifiers as the backend of a fully-working MAI system.