“Construction of Bilingual Thesaurus on Social sciences – a study with special focus on Sociology.”

Abstract

One of the effective mechanisms in the process of interactive retrieval is vocabulary control. The controlled vocabulary exists to facilitate communication in the information retrieval process. The complete set of index terms used in retrieval systems may be referred to as the vocabulary of index language of the systems. If the vocabulary control list also displays for each of the terms it‟s broader, narrower, coordinate terms and associated terms then it would be a very useful tool in information retrieval. For the necessary terms to be used for indexing and for searching could be taken from the list. Such a list is thesaurus. Thesaurus, classification scheme and subject heading lists are three general types of tools designed to control vocabularies of a given information storage and retrieval system. A thesaurus acts as a control device which helps users to formulate their questions precisely. It also acts as an aid to index in assigning the preferred descriptor to subjects of documents. The main objective of this paper is to construct a thesaurus on social sciences as a suitable technique to define the social sciences discplines to act a guide to information search. This paper attempts to describe the step by step procedures for designing a bilingual thesaurus on Social Sciences with special focus on sociology which could be act as working tool for the indexing and retrieval of all documents and publications. Data analysis was based on Facet analytical approach devised by S.R.Ranganathan. This thesaurus in the first instance, was constructed in English language using as input, facet analyzed subject headings derived from a collection of terms in the field of Social Sciences and then assigned suitable terminology in Tamil.