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RésuméAccess to large or complex digital documents can be facilitated by a so-called « back-of-the-book index », which presents schematically the concepts discussed in the document and links made between them by the author. It can thus be a very useful tool to explore document content. The research project described here pertains to an analysis of semantic relations expressed in manually-compiled indexes, in order to determine which could be derived automatically. Seven indexes were examined. The resulting observations suggest two types of relations: those that can be calculated simply from the document’s content, and those for which external terminological resources are necessary. This has identified areas for further research into automatic back-of-the-book indexing.