Learning to extract folktale keywords

Manually assigned keywords provide a valuable means for accessing large document collections. They can serve as a shallow document summary and enable more efficient retrieval and aggregation of information. In this paper we investigate keywords in the context of the Dutch Folktale Database, a large collection of stories including fairy tales, jokes and urban legends. We carry out a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the keywords in the collection. Up to 80% of the assigned keywords (or a minor variation) appear in the text itself. Human annotators show moderate to substantial agreement in their judgment of keywords. Finally, we evaluate a learning to rank approach to extract and rank keyword candidates. We conclude that this is a promising approach to automate this time intensive task.