The NLM Indexing Initiative’s Medical Text Indexer

The Medical Text Indexer (MTI) is a program for producing McSH®indexing recommendations. It is the major product of NLM's Indexing Initiative and has been used in both semi-automated and fully automated indexing environments at the Library since mid 2002. We report here on an experiment conducted with MEDLINE®indexers to evaluate MTI's performance and to generate ideas for its improvement as a tool for user-assisted indexing. We also discuss some ltering techniques developed to improve MTI's accuracy for use primarily in automatically producing the indexing for several abstracts collections.