The automatic construction of a glossary

In this paper the term “glossary” refers to a list, in alphabetical order, of all the different words used in any text, together with a statement of how many times each word occurs in the text.The manual construction of a glossary is usually made with the aid of a card index, where one card is used to note the occurrences of each different word in the text. The procedure consists of attempts to look up each consecutive word of the text in the card index; if the word is found, its present occurrence is noted on the card; but if it is not found, a new card is made out and inserted into the index.The automatic construction of a glossary is similar in principle, but the logical rules by which the construction is made are more complicated because the store of an electronic computer, unlike a card index, is limited in size and, in general, is not large enough to contain the entire glossary of a text of average length. There are many ways of overcoming this difficulty and two of the more reasonable ones are discussed below