Can back-of-the-book indexes be automatically created?

Automatic creation of back-of-the-book indexes remains one of the few manual tasks related to publishing. Inspired by how human indexers work on back-of-the-book indexes creation, we present a new domain-independent, corpus-free and training-free automation approach. Given a book, the index terms will be sequentially selected according to an indexability score encoded by the structure information residing in a book as well as a novel context-aware term informativeness measurement utilizing the power of the web knowledge base such as Wikipedia. By extensive experiments on books from various domains, we show our approach to be a more effective and practical than ones that used previous keyword extraction and supervised learning.