Evaluation of French and English MeSH indexing systems with a parallel corpus.
OBJECTIVE
This paper presents the evaluation of two MeSH indexing systems for French and English on a parallel corpus.


METHODS
We describe two automatic MeSH in-dexing systems - MTI for English, and MAIF for French. The French version of the evaluation resources has been manually indexed with MeSH keyword/qualifier pairs. This professional indexing is used as our gold standard in the evaluation of both systems on keyword retrieval.


RESULTS
The English system (MTI) obtains significantly better precision and recall (78% precision and 21% recall at rank 1, vs. 37%. precision and 6% recall for MAIF ). Moreover, the performance of both systems can be optimised by the break-age function used by the French system (MAIF), which selects an adaptive number of descriptors for each resource indexed.


CONCLUSIONS
MTI achieves better performance. However, both systems have features that can benefit each other.
Névéol
Aurélie
A
Laboratoire PSI-FRE 2645 CNRS -INSA de Rouen, France. aneveol@insa-rouen.fr
Mork
James G
JG
Aronson
Alan R
AR
Darmoni
Stéfan J
SJ
D000043:Abstracting and Indexing / Q000379:methods*; D000465:Algorithms; D001330:Electronic Data Processing; D051188:Knowledge Bases; D007802:Language; D046650:Medical Subject Headings; D009323:Natural Language Processing