Automatically Generated Hypertext Versions of Scholarly Articles and Their Evaluation

摘要

The overall objective of this work is to develop and evaluate ways of automatically incorporating hypertext links into pre-existing scientific articles. Some readers like hypertext even when it is not as useful to them as the linear document from which it was generated. Hypertexts must therefore be evaluated for usefulness and acceptability. We describe rules for making links and an experiment using two methods of applying those rules, to show how such rules should be evaluated, and to see if they truly help people. In addition to measures of performance we also collected measures of preference. The effectiveness of these links was evaluated by testing with people. Performance was determined by measuring the accuracy and inclusiveness of answers to questions about the article, and written summaries. Readers judged the quality of links (and thereby the quality of the rules used to forge them) and the overall effectiveness of the hypertext. Most readers did not read the entire articles in the time allotted. Readers had no preference for articles with or without novel link types, but they did have a strong preference for definition and structural links over (novel) semantic links. Readers of documents with only structural links had comprehension scores that were inversely proportional to their satisfaction ratings. No performance difference was detected.