- Key Word in Context
KWIC is an acronym for Key Word In Context, the most common format for concordance lines. The term KWIC was first coined by
Hans Peter Luhn . [Manning, C. D., Schütze, H.: "Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing", p.35. The MIT Press, 1999]A KWIC index is formed by sorting and aligning the words within an article title to allow each word (except the
stop words ) in titles to be searchable alphabetically in the index. It was a useful indexing method for technical manuals before computerizedfull text search became common.For example, the title statement of this article and the would appear as follows in a KWIC index. A KWIC index usually uses a wide layout to allow the display of maximum 'in context' information (not shown in the following example).
The term permuted index is another name for a KWIC index, referring to the fact that it indexes all
cyclic permutation s of the headings. Books composed of many short sections with their own descriptive headings, most notably collections of manual pages, often ended with a permuted index section, allowing the reader to easily find a section by any word from its heading. This practice is no longer common today.References in Literature
"Note: The first reference does not show the KWIC index unless you pay to view the paper. The second reference does not even list the paper at all."
* D. L. Parnas uses a KWIC Index as an example on how to perform modular design in his paper " [http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=361623&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=9516243&CFTOKEN=98251202 On the Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules] " - Available as [http://www.acm.org/classics/may96/ ACM Classic Paper]
* Christopher D. Manning and Hinrich Schütze describes a KWIC index and computer concordancing in section 1.4.5 of their book "Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing"References
ee also
*
Concordancer
*Concordance (publishing)
*Burrows-Wheeler transform
*Hans Peter Luhn
*Suffix tree
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