The ACRL Technical Services Interest Group (TSIG) invites all who are interested to attend a virtual program on AI, NLP, BERT, and assisted subject indexing (details below). The program takes place Wednesday, March 20, 2024, 1:00-2:00 pm (Eastern). Registration information is forthcoming.
Speaker: Charlene Chou, Head of Knowledge Access, New York University, Division of Libraries
Presentation title: An Analysis of BERT (NLP) for Assisted Subject Indexing for Digital Library Collections
Abstract: Subject indexing has been one of users' top demands for accessing library resources effectively. With the rapid increase of digital resources, automated subject indexing has been an important research subject in recent years. However, there are major challenges for providing quality subject access to users and automatic subject indexing solutions have still not been widely adopted in the discovery systems of libraries and related institutions, according to various studies.
In light of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and NLP (Natural language processing) technologies, this presentation examines the feasibility of using AI/NLP models to enhance the subject indexing of digital resources. While BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) models are widely used in scholarly communities, we assess whether BERT models can be used in machine-assisted indexing in the Project Gutenberg collection, through suggesting Library of Congress subject headings filtered by certain Library of Congress Classification subclass labels. The findings of this study are informative for further research on BERT models to assist with automatic subject indexing for digital library collections.
A Q&A session will follow the speaker's presentation.
Thank you,
Dan Tam Do (ACRL TSIG Convener)
Alyssa Koclanes (ACRL TSIG Incoming Convener)
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Dan Tam Do
Head of Cataloging
University of Pittsburgh Library System
Pittsburgh, PA
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