Inter-Linker Consistency in the Manual Construction of Hypertext Documents

Abstract

The creation of hypertext links by manual means is difficult and costly, but is often preferred to automatic methods in attempts to optimize hypertext ‘quality’. Experiments show, however, that levels of consistency amongst human link-creators—in common with those historically observed amongst human indexers—are generally low and variable, and that the effectiveness of retrieval from manually-constructed hypertexts can be expected to suffer as a result. This finding motivates further comparison both of manual and of automatic methods of link creation. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.3.1 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Content Analysis and Indexing - Indexing methods H.5.4 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Hypertext/Hypermedia - Architectures I.7.2 [Document and Text Processing]: Document Preparation - Hypertext/Hypermedia. © 1999, ACM. All rights reserved.