tag generation from a text content

Question

I am curious if there is an algorithm/method exists to generate keywords/tags from a given text, by using some weight calculations, occurrence ratio or other tools.

Answer 1

A very simple solution to the problem would be:

• count the occurences of each word in the text
• consider the most frequent terms as the key phrases
• have a black-list of 'stop words' to remove common words like the, and, it, is etc

I'm sure there are cleverer, stats based solutions though.

If you need a solution to use in a larger project rather than for interests sake, Yahoo BOSS has a key term extraction method.