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Conceptual Indexing: A Better Way to Organize Knowledge
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Author(s):
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William A. Woods
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Report Number:
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Date Published:
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Available Formats:
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TR-97-61
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April 1997
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Portable Document Format (PDF)
Postscript (PS)
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| Abstract |
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This paper is about organizing knowledge to make it more easily accessible by people who need to use it. The paper presents a technique called "conceptual indexing" that combines techniques from knowledge representation and natural language processing to
enable a computer to systematically organize relationships among concepts and to use these relationships to substantially improve people's ability to find specific information in response to specific needs. Conceptual indexing automatically organizes all
of the words and phrases of a body of material into a conceptual taxonomy that explicitly links each concept to its most specific generalizations. This taxonomic structure is used to organize links between semantically related concepts, and to make connections
between terms of a request and related concepts in the index. Conceptual indexing can be used alone to organize information for browsing and lookup, or can be combined with search and retrieval techniques to improve retrieval effectiveness. The
technique provides a partial solution to the "paraphrase problem"--the situation that arises when terms used in a request are different from terminology used in the information sought.
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