Inferring document similarity from hyperlinks

Assessing semantic similarity between text documents is a crucial aspect in Information Retrieval systems. In this work, we propose to use hyperlink information to derive a similarity measure that can then be applied to compare any text documents, with or without hyperlinks. As linked documents are generally semantically closer than unlinked documents, we use a training corpus with hyperlinks to infer a function a,b → sim(a,b) that assigns a higher value to linked documents than to unlinked ones. Two sets of experiments on different corpora show that this function compares favorably with OKAPI matching on document retrieval tasks.