Using lexical chains to build hypertext links in newspaper articles

We discuss an automatic method for the construction of hypertext links within and between newspaper articles. The method comprises three steps: determining the lexical chains in a text, building links between the paragraphs of articles, and building links between articles. Lexical chains capture the semantic relations between words that occur throughout a text. Each chain is a set of related words that captures a portion of the cohesive structure of a text. By considering the distribution of chains within an article, we can build links between the paragraphs. By comparing the chains contained in two different articles, we can decide whether or not to place a link between them. We also present the results of an experiment designed to measure inter-linker consistency in the manual construction of hypertext links between the paragraphs of newspaper articles. The results show that inter-linker consistency is low, but better than that obtained in a previous experiment.