The development of automatic indexing, abstracting, and extracting systems is investigated. Part I describes the development of tools for making syntactic and semantic distinctions of potential use in automatic indexing and extracting. One of these tools is a program for syntactic analysis (i.e., parsing) of English, the other is a dictionary of English word government patterns. Part II reports on the research program in describing and abstracting pictorial structures. This work is concerned with whether it is possible to construct a symbolic representation of a gray level picture which can provide essentially the same information as the picture itself. Based on a series of experiments using human subjects describing aerial terrain photographs, it was possible to make certain observations concerning deductive and metadescriptive aspects of description, i.e., the "set," contextual knowledge, and certainty of the subject. (Author/NH)