Automatic versus manual indexing

摘要

A comparative evaluation has been carried out on the Philips “DIRECT” and the British “INSPEC” retrieval system. DIRECT is based on automatic indexing whereas INSPEC uses manual subject indexing.Two queries were submitted to both systems, using the same data base. The results are expressed in terms of recall and precision. Both recall and precision of INSPEC were found to be higher than those of DIRECT by 20%. It is concluded that this is mainly a result of the query formulation. The effectiveness obtained with automatic indexing of documents is equivalent to that of the manual procedure.