A methodology for noun phrase-based automatic indexing

The scholarly community is increasingly employing the Web both for publication of scholarly output and for locating and accessing relevant scholarly literature. Organization of this vast body of digital information assumes significance in this context. The sheer volume of digital information to be handled makes traditional indexing and knowledge representation strategies ineffective and impractical. It is, therefore, worth exploring new approaches. An approach being discussed considers the intrinsic semantics of texts of documents. Based on the hypothesis that noun phrases in a text are semantically rich in terms of their ability to represent the subject content of the document, this approach seeks to identify and extract noun phrases instead of single keywords, and use them as descriptors. This paper presents a methodology that has been developed for extracting noun phrases from Portuguese texts. The results of an experiment carried out to test the adequacy of the methodology are also presented.