THE USE OF SEMANTIC LINKS IN HYPERTEXT INFORMATION-RETRIEVAL

Hypermedia links support the manual browsing through large hypertext o r hypermedia collections; however, retrieving specific portions of inf ormation in such a collection cannot be achieved by browsing only. Ret rieval mechanisms are necessary. In this article we highlight the noti on of semantic links and show how the semantic content of hypertext li nks can be used for retrieval purposes. We present indexing and retrie val algorithms that exploit the link content in addition to the conten t of the nodes. Retrieval status values are obtained from a combinatio n of conventional information retrieval and constrained spreading acti vation techniques. The results of some retrieval experiments in a hype rtext test collection are presented: They are clearly superior to thos e obtained when the links are ignored. Since hypermedia collections ba sically have the same structure as hypertexts, the hope is that the sa me techniques can be applied to hypermedia information with the same e ffect of improving the retrieval results. Moreover, we hope that the r esults can be improved further by more sophisticated indexing algorith ms.