Kratt: Developing an Automatic Subject Indexing Tool for The National Library of Estonia
This addresses the time-consuming and costly process of subject indexing for libraries, though it is incremental as it builds on existing AI methods for a specific domain.
The researchers tackled the problem of manual subject indexing in libraries by developing Kratt, an AI-based tool that automatically assigns keywords from the Estonian Subject Thesaurus to books, completing the task in about 1 minute, which is 10-15 times faster than humans.
Manual subject indexing in libraries is a time-consuming and costly process and the quality of the assigned subjects is affected by the cataloguer's knowledge on the specific topics contained in the book. Trying to solve these issues, we exploited the opportunities arising from artificial intelligence to develop Kratt: a prototype of an automatic subject indexing tool. Kratt is able to subject index a book independent of its extent and genre with a set of keywords present in the Estonian Subject Thesaurus. It takes Kratt approximately 1 minute to subject index a book, outperforming humans 10-15 times. Although the resulting keywords were not considered satisfactory by the cataloguers, the ratings of a small sample of regular library users showed more promise. We also argue that the results can be enhanced by including a bigger corpus for training the model and applying more careful preprocessing techniques.