Kratt: Developing an Automatic Subject Indexing Tool for the National Library of Estonia
Marit Asula, Jane Makke, Linda Freienthal, Hele-Andra Kuulmets, Raul Sirel
Abstract
Manual subject indexing in libraries is a time-consuming and costly process and the quality of the assigned subjects is affected by the cataloger’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 one minute to subject index a book, outperforming humans 10–15 times. Although the resulting keywords were not considered satisfactory by the catalogers, 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.