The cognitive processes in conceptual analysis: a marginal note between library science and linguistics

Abstract

The article describes the main cognitive processes involved in document analysis by illustrating their nature and practical implications. These processes consist of a number of inferences based on text-context interaction, and aimed at the interpretation of words (as well as of relationships between words), at understanding the relevant topics within a text, and at identifying their significance in relation to specific information needs.
The conceptual analysis model can be described as an interactive model which involves two components: a) a bottom-up – or perceptual – process, which examines the information within the document; b) a top-down – or cognitive – process, which turns on different kinds of contextual knowledge (linguistic, extra-linguistic, intertextual etc.) essential for understanding words and sentences, for selecting concepts, and choosing indexing terms.
The article also investigates the notions of 'meaning', 'concept', 'frame', and 'summarization', and their corresponding significance in subject indexing, with some references to linguistics.