Using lexical chains for keyword extraction

Keywords can be considered as condensed versions of documents and short forms of their summaries. In this paper, the problem of automatic extraction of keywords from documents is treated as a supervised learning task. A lexical chain holds a set of semantically related words of a text and it can be said that a lexical chain represents the semantic content of a portion of the text. Although lexical chains have been extensively used in text summarization, their usage for keyword extraction problem has not been fully investigated. In this paper, a keyword extraction technique that uses lexical chains is described, and encouraging results are obtained.