Evaluation of a simple method for the automatic assignment of MeSH descriptors to health resources in a French online catalogue.

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%. CONCLUSION: 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.