From keywords to links: an automatic approach

This study explores using keywords to automatically generate hyperlinks for large sets of reference materials. A content analysis was performed and the results indicate that keywords seem to be closely associated with manually generated hyperlinks. Two prototypes were developed, differing in whether the keywords were manually generated by the author, or mechanically extracted by an automatic process. In both prototypes, different types of intra-document and inter-document links were generated. A preliminary evaluation on the first prototype (which was based on manually identified keywords) shows that this prototype system holds promise for further exploration. In the second prototype, keywords were automatically extracted with Oracle Text gist/theme generation tools. Although the automatically extracted keywords were different from those identified by authors, there was a significant overlap between the set of links generated by each prototype. The next step will be testing the usefulness of this automatic approach with a thorough user evaluation.