Link as you type: using key phrases for automated dynamic link generation

Abstract

When documents are collected together from diverse sources they are unlikely to contain useful hypertext links to support browsing amongst them. For large collections of thousands of documents it is prohibitively resource intensive to manually insert links into each document. Users of such collections may wish to relate documents within them to text that they are themselves generating. This process, often involving keyword searching, distracts from the authoring process and results in material related to query terms but not necessarily to the author’s document. Query terms that are effective in one collection might not be so in another. We have developed Phrasier, a system that integrates authoring (of text and hyperlinks), browsing, querying and reading in support of information retrieval activities. Phrasier exploits key phrases which are automatically extracted from documents in a collection, and uses them as link anchors and to identify candidate destinations for hyperlinks. This system suggests links into existing collections for purposes of authoring and retrieval of related information, creates links between documents in a collection and provides supportive document and link overviews.