Automated classification of textual documents based on a controlled vocabulary in engineering

Automated subject classification has been a challenging research issue for many years now, receiving particular attention in the past decade due to rapid increase of digital documents. The most frequent approach to automated classification is machine learning. It, however, requires training documents and performs well on new documents only if these are similar enough to the former. We explore a string-matching algorithm based on a controlled vocabulary, which does not require training documents-instead it reuses the intellectual work put into creating the controlled vocabulary. Terms from the Engineering Information thesaurus and classification scheme were matched against title and abstract of engineering papers from the Compendex database. Simple string-matching was enhanced by several methods such as term weighting schemes and cut-offs, exclusion of certain terms, and enrichment of the controlled vocabulary with automatically extracted terms. The best results are 76% recall when the controlled vocabulary is enriched with new terms, and 79% precision when certain terms are excluded. Precision of individual classes is up to 98%. These results are comparable to state-of-the-art-machine-learning algorithms.