Design and Evaluation of Phrasier, an Interactive System for Linking Documents Using Keyphrases

When documents are collected together from diverse sources they are unlikely to contain useful hypertext links to support browsing amongst them. Manual, or semi-automated link creation is often infeasibly time-consuming for large document collections. We present Phrasier, an interactive system which automatically introduces links to related material into documents as the user browses and queries a digital library collection. Suitable links are identified using keyphrases that are identified within document text and support both topic-based and interdocument navigation. Previews of link destinations are provided to reduce unproductive link traversals, and important segments of document text are identified and highlighted to support skimming of viewed documents. Evaluation has shown that PhrasierÕs keyphrase-based linking mechanism produces sparse hypertexts, although similar documents tend to have short paths between them. A study using human assessors in a simulated document retrieval task indicated that the generated links are perceived to be useful and relevant.