assignment indexing
n.
The process of creating an ordered list of headings, using terms that may not be found in the text, with pointers to relevant portions in the material.
Notes
Assignment indexing usually draws headings from a controlled vocabulary. Assignment indexing is distinguished from extraction indexing, typically done by a computer, which relies on the terms found in the document. At one point, assignment indexing was a manual process, requiring human judgment to link the headings to the concepts in the text. The process of assigning terms from a controlled vocabulary has been automated, with mixed success, by building rules of analysis that can assign headings on the basis of other, related terms in the text.
