keywordlike

Keywordlike is a descriptive term used in information science and related fields to refer to words or phrases that function like keywords in indexing and retrieval, even when they are not formally designated as metadata or entries in a controlled vocabulary. In practice, keywordlike terms help locate relevant documents by signaling content focus.

The term is a neologism rather than a formal standard. It is used to discuss how certain content terms act as anchors for search and categorization without being officially assigned as keywords. Keywordlike terms may arise from domain-specific language, topical emphasis in the text, or statistical associations learned by models.

Characteristics and methods: Keywordlike terms are typically high-signal, content-bearing terms. They can be extracted or ranked by TF-IDF, topic modeling, or neural embeddings, and they often overlap with automatically suggested search queries. They are not guaranteed to be stable across corpora or languages.

Applications and implications: In information retrieval and tagging, keywordlike terms can improve relevance by serving as user-intended prompts or as features in classifiers. They inform summarization and search tools, but can introduce inconsistency if not reconciled with a controlled vocabulary or standardized indexes.

See also: keywords, tagging, metadata, information retrieval, natural language processing.