NAFTA Cruncher

According to developer Minnesota developer lconovex, Indexicon, an automatic indexing add-on for WordPerfect for Windows, took just ten minutes running on a 486/66 to automatically generate a back-of-the-book index for the full eleven hundred pages of the NAFTA agreement. While WordPerfect and other major wordprocessing packages include an indexing function, each item must be manually tagged with the appropriate index code; these programs basically handle the collating and formatting of manually indexed entries. Using linguistic knowledge to identify significant terms and phrases, Indexicon (US$149) goes a step further. For fine-tuning lndexicon’s dictionaries, lconovex supplies an optional tool, lex Edit (US$50).
    lndexicon is based on Syntactica, Ionovex’s “English language concept processing system.” Syntactica, Iconovex claims, “understands” English; it performs syntactic and semantic analysis and recognizes idioms, metaphors, and homographs. Syntactica can generate three forms of output: a keyword or back-of-the book index, a concept index, or an indicative abstract. For third party developers, lconovex offers, Syntactica as a DOS, Macintosh, or Unix toolkit for third party developers.
    As editors and authors know, producing an index is a non-trivial operation, particularly when it comes to nested entries and cross-references. Here, lndexicon’s brute force approach may not produce the desired results. Nonetheless, Indexicon is yet another sign of the gradual arrival of simple and not so simple linguistic technology in mainstream commercial software packages.

lconovex, 7448 West 78th Street, Bloomington, MN, 55439, USA; Tel- + 1 612 943 0292, Fax: + 1 612 943 1087, Email: 74064.440@compuserve.com