The effectiveness of a nonsyntactic approach to automatic phrase indexing for document retrieval

It may be possible to improve the quality of automatic indexing systems by using complex descriptors, for example, phrases, in addition to the simple descriptors (words or word stems) that are normally used in automatically constructed representations of document content. This study is directed toward the goal of developing effective methods of identifying phrases in natural language text from which good quality phrase descriptors can be constructed. The effectiveness of one method, a simple nonsyntactic phrase indexing procedure, has been tested on five experimental document collections. The results have been analyzed in order to identify the inadequacies of the procedure, and to determine what kinds of information about text structure are needed in order to construct phrase descriptors that are good indicators of document content. Two primary conclusions have been reached: (1) In the retrieval experiments, the nonsyntactic phrase construction procedure did not consistently yield substantial improvements in effectiveness. It is therefore not likely that phrase indexing of this kind will prove to be an important method of enhancing the performance of automatic document indexing and retrieval systems in operational environments. (2) Many of the shortcomings of the nonsyntactic approach can be overcome by incorporating syntactic information into the phrase construction process. However, a general syntactic analysis facility may be required, since many useful sources of phrases cannot be exploited if only a limited inventory of syntactic patterns can be recognized. Further research should be conducted into methods of incorporating automatic syntactic analysis into content analysis for document retrieval. © 1989 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.