Computer generation of thesaurus from structured subject-propositions

Several experiments were conducted at the Documentation Research and Training Centre for generating thesaurus. The work reported in this paper, uses subject headings structured according to postulates and principles for facet analysis, as the input for generating thesaurus. The system uses a coding scheme for augmenting the subject headings to make them suitable for computer manipulation. Once the subject headings are coded and input, the other processes are done automatically. The system has five phases namely, Translation Phase, Term-pair Generation Phase, Coordinate Term-pair Generation Phase, Retranslation Phase and Printing Phase. The system is described briefly, giving the systems flow-chart, inputs and outputs of the different phases and a sample printout of a model thesaurus generated using test data of about 1500 subject-propositions from Leather Technology.