Key phrases are meant to serve multiple goals:
1. They enable the reader to quickly determine whether the given article is of interest
2. When key phrases are gathered in the cumulative index – the goal is indexing. They enable the reader to quickly find relevant content when the reader has a specific need.
3. A search that matches a given query term in the keyword field will yield a higher quality list of hits than a search for the same term in the full text of the documents.
Given the fact that we are inundated with information there is a need for tools that can automatically create key phrases. And paradoxically, although key phrases are very useful, only a small minority of the online documents provide key phrases.
The principle for choosing key phrases is that the key phrase list is relatively short and it must contain only the most important, topical phrases for a given document.
Context Organizer treats a document as a set of phrases which must be ranked in terms of relevancy. It views key phrase determination as a classification problem. The task is to classify content in the document into one of two categories: either it is a key phrase or it is not a key phrase. The software evaluates key phrases by the degree to which its classifications correspond to human-generated classifications.
A huge advantage of the product is that the use of Context Organizer does not require costly training. It works instantly. The applied genetic algorithm and statistical methods are applicable across any types of documents.
Key phrases serve diverse goals the main one being the ability to capture the most important topics of the documents.
And since a key phrase list can be read and judged in seconds the usefulness of this approach leads to practical applications. Once the key phrases are identified the contextual summaries are easily recognized and collected. The key phrases and summaries are a suitable candidates for mind mapping, generating briefings, reports, documents summaries, indexes, back-of-the-book lists for browsing, profiling user interests, personalization of subscriptions and many more applications.
There are many ways to further customize summarization by creating keywords to watch and keywords to block lists. The biggest advantage of summarization is that it acts as content filtering applications. And in this sense it works in a similar way that we read text which is mostly by scanning and skimming.
* This mind map was produced using Context Organizer for MindManager
Context Organizer is available in English, French, German and Spanish.