What is Machine Aided Indexing?
Machine Aided Indexing (MAI) was originally developed by CASI
as an aid to indexing technical literature for the NASA STI Database.
The new web-based application was designed to provide authors,
editors, information analysts, and others with a convenient, fully
interactive tool for determining the subject content of documents,
and identifying keywords and terms for various uses. At the heart
of the application is a natural language processor
that can accept any user-supplied text as input--including abstracts,
full-text documents, or web pages. Within seconds the text is
analyzed and a ranked listing of subject terms results. The 17,800
terms of the NASA Thesaurus serve as the foundation for the extensive
knowledge base used by MAI. Using this established vocabulary
of terms, MAI provides valuable assistance in assuring that technical
reports and other STI documents are uniformly and consistently
accessible. Additional benefits are described in the next section.
Of particular interest to traditional users of the NASA
Thesaurus, is that the new tool incorporates a fully searchable
thesaurus display module. Term-lookup and browsing
are simple and efficient using the module's word-search and hierarchy
navigation capabilities--a marked improvement over the previous
printed and PDF versions of the NASA Thesaurus.
Additional information: