Luhn, Hans Peter (1896-1964)

Hans Peter Luhn was a pioneer in information science in the USA. He introduced, among other things, KWIC-indexing, the SDI-concept and automatic construction of abstracts on the basis of statistical occurrences of words.


Luhn’s Resolving Power is - together with Zipf's law among the basic principles used in automatic indexing. Present techniques are mainly based on an analysis of frequency occurrences of words in the text, as first proposed by Luhn (1958). He also noticed that it is convenient to exclude as keywords both common and rare words, and proposed that the ability of words to discriminate content can be represented by a function of the rank peaked at intermediate values. Citação