On the creation of hypertext links in full‐text documents: Measurement of retrieval effectiveness

Abstract

An important stage in the process of retrieval of objects from a hypertext database is the creation of a set of internodal links that are intended to represent the relationships existing between objects; this operation is often undertaken manually, just as index terms are often manually assigned to documents in a conventional retrieval system. In an earlier article (Ellis, D., Furner-Hines, J., & Willett, P., 1994b), the results were published of a study in which several different sets of links were inserted, each by a different person, between the paragraphs of each of a number of full-text documents. These results showed little similarity between the link-sets, a finding that was comparable with those of studies of inter-indexer consistency, which suggest that there is generally only a low level of agreement between the sets of index terms assigned to a document by different indexers. In this article, a description is provided of an investigation into the nature of the relationship existing between (i) the levels of inter-linker consistency obtaining among the group of hypertext databases used in our earlier experiments, and (ii) the levels of effectiveness of a number of searches carried out in those databases. An account is given of the implementation of the searches and of the methods used in the calculation of numerical values expressing their effectiveness. Analysis of the results of a comparison between recorded levels of consistency and those of effectiveness does not allow us to draw conclusions about the consistency-effectiveness relationship that are equivalent to those drawn in comparable studies of inter-indexer consistency. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.