METHODS FOR EVALUATING THE QUALITY OF HYPERTEXT LINKS

We present two methods for evaluating automatically generated hypertex t links. The first method is based on correlations between shortest pa ths in the hypertext structure and a semantic similarity measure. Expe rimental results with the first method show the degree to which the hy pertext conversion process approximates semantic similarity. The seman tic measure is in turn only an approximation of a user's internal mode l of the corpus. Therefore we propose a second evaluation method based on measuring user's performance using hypertext. Finally, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of computer versus human evaluation, respectively. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.