Making Digital Libraries Effective: Automatic Generation of Links for Similarity Search Across Hyper-textbooks

Textbooks are more available in electronic format now than in the past. Because textbooks are typically large, the end user needs effective tools to rapidly access information encapsulated in textbooks stored in digital libraries. Statistical similarity-based links among hypertextbooks are a means to provide those tools. In this paper, the design and the implementation of a tool that generates networks of links within and across hypertextbooks through a completely automatic and unsupervised procedure is described. The design is based on statistical techniques. The overall methodology is presented together with the results of a case study reached through a working prototype that shows that connecting hyper-textbooks is an efficient way to provide an effective retrieval capability.