Reading the Neighborhood: Text-Attentive Graph Reranking for Automated Subject Indexing
Subject indexing assigns descriptors from a controlled vocabulary to bibliographic records, a task characterized by thousands of labels, few positive examples per label, and a long tail of rarely used descriptors. Existing extreme multi-label classifiers treat the vocabulary as a flat list, ignoring the semantic relations that thesauri encode. We present TAGHN, a heterogeneous graph reranker over a per-document subgraph of retrieved candidates augmented with the thesaurus neighborhood. The relevance of a candidate descriptor is estimated jointly from its similarity with the document and also the degree to which the candidate's thesaurus neighborhood matches the document content. A decomposed scoring head combines interpretable graph-derived features with retrieval signals. On STW, an economic thesaurus of 6,198 descriptors, TAGHN reaches 0.380 macro F1 against 0.346 for a fine-tuned cross-encoder and 0.278 for a fixed-vocabulary XMLC classifier. In terms of micro F1, it outperforms reranking models and stays competitive (-3.0) with the best fixed-vocabulary XMLC model. Qualitative analysis shows the graph resolving errors that per-label scoring cannot, selecting a narrower gold descriptor where an unstructured reranker settles for its broader parent.