Document Field

Definition

A document field is a part of a document or of the document metadata in which the text has a particular function. A document field can contain free or preformatted text. Each field, according to its function, has different characteristics, length, and term distributions.

Key Points

Textual documents have implicit structure, which aids the understanding of the text. Long textual documents are usually organized in chapters, sections, paragraphs, and each of those can have a concise description in the form of a title. In the case of hypertext documents, explicit links between documents in the form of hyperlinks are often associated with anchor text. News wire documents also have metadata such as date, or the name of the author. Efforts to standardize metadata about documents have resulted in projects such as the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative [1].

Fields are also being used to represent the annotations of text with semantic and syntactic information. For example, the semantic...