Bachir, Imad Abdul Munhem; (1995) Title-derivative printed indexes for Arabic periodical articles. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D.), University College London.

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Abstract

This thesis investigates the issue of using titles of Arabic academic periodical articles as a basis for printed indexes generated automatically by means of computers. The informativeness of the Arabic titles is examined by counting the number of their keywords in 16 disciplines and comparing the results with those for English periodical articles in the same subjects. Arabic titles are found to be as informative as English titles. The representation of the tides of their accompanying articles is examined by matching between the titles and their corresponding subject headings assigned by indexers in 10 subjects. To support the encouraging results of the title keywords and subject headings matching process, a separate study evaluates the representation of tides by comparing the keywords found in titles to the content of their accompanying topic sentences in the introduction and objectives parts of articles in 5 disciplines. The practical side of the issue is also observed by the actual production of two types of printed indexes : one conventional, representing al-Fihrist which is the most used Arabic index in the Arab countries, and another unconventional KWOC type, representing the title keyword indexing technique with the assistance of the Arabic version of OMNIS 3.3. The retrieval effectiveness of the two types is examined by commissioning 20 Arab users to retrieve relevant articles to 9 queries composed to embody the various cases of retrieval difficulty. The sample Arabic titles used in every examination process in the thesis are taken from current periodicals which use the Modern Standard Arabic as a medium of communication. Bearing in mind the retrieval problems and the problems evolved during the production process of the Arabic KWOC type index, the thesis concludes that titles of Arabic articles in the examined disciplines can be used to produce acceptable printed indexes.

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