title: Evaluation of a simple method for the automatic assignment of MeSH descriptors to health resources in a French online catalogue.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  The growing number of resources to be indexed in the catalogue of online health resources in French (CISMeF) calls for curating strategies involving automatic indexing tools while maintaining the catalogue's high indexing quality standards.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  To develop a simple automatic tool that retrieves MeSH descriptors from documents titles.
  
  
  METHODS
  In parallel to research on advanced indexing methods, a bag-of-words tool was developed for timely inclusion in CISMeF's maintenance system. An evaluation was carried out on a corpus of 99 documents. The indexing sets retrieved by the automatic tool were compared to manual indexing based on the title and on the full text of resources.
  
  
  RESULTS
  58% of the major main headings were retrieved by the bag-of-words algorithm and the precision on main heading retrieval was 69%.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Bag-of-words indexing has effectively been used on selected resources to be included in CISMeF since August 2006. Meanwhile, on going work aims at improving the current version of the tool.
authors.affiliation: U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, USA.
authors.forename: Aurélie
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Névéol
authors.forename: Suzanne
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Pereira
authors.forename: Gaetan
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Kerdelhué
authors.forename: Badisse
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Dahamna
authors.forename: Michel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Joubert
authors.forename: Stéfan J
authors.initials: SJ
authors.lastname: Darmoni
mesh_terms: D000043:Abstracting and Indexing / Q000379:methods*; D002377:Catalogs as Topic; D046650:Medical Subject Headings; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D009862:Online Systems