1. A light weight subject indexing system, comprising: a candidate headword identification system for identifying candidate words in the subject line of a document which are not listed in a user modified common word list; a lexical context system for creating a lexical context for an identified candidate headword; a ranking system for ranking the set of identified candidate headwords for a collection of documents and selecting among them for inclusion in an index; and an index creation system for listing selected candidate headwords based on the results of ranking and selection.