Automatic generation and refinement of hypertext links

Abstract

Current generation of hypertext systems suffer from the limitations that they are static in nature, and they do not support the automated process of link creation very well. Because of the efforts involved in manually creating links, the hyperbases created using these systems are seldom modified even when they were found not to fully support the requirements of the intended users. This paper studies the development of automated tools to aid in the process of link creation, browsing, and link refinement. Only relation links are considered in this study. The automated tools are developed to help in three of the major stages of developing and using hypertext applications: (a) during authoring to generate a set of relation links between pairs of nodes; (b) during browsing to recommend an optimal set of starting nodes for the users to begin browsing, and to guide the users at each stage of browsing by suggesting a set of “next” nodes to traverse; and, (c) during training to modify, remove and add links based on users' feedback data collected. The training will result in long-term changes in the hypertext structure.

In order to test the effectiveness of the training process objectively, a navigator is built to simulate the browsing activities of the users. The effects of training have been evaluated on two text collections using a variety of objective measures. The results indicate that the training process has improved the effectiveness of the hyperbase to support browsing.