A text mining approach for automatic construction of hypertexts

The research on automatic hypertext construction emerges rapidly in the last decade because there exists a urgent need to translate the gigantic amount of legacy documents into web pages. Unlike traditional 'flat' texts, a hypertext contains a number of navigational hyperlinks that point to some related hypertexts or locations of the same hypertext. Traditionally, these hyperlinks were constructed by the creators of the web pages with or without the help of some authoring tools. However, the gigantic amount of documents produced each day prevent from such manual construction. Thus an automatic hypertext construction method is necessary for content providers to efficiently produce adequate information that can be used by web surfers. Although most of the web pages contain a number of non-textual data such as images, sounds, and video clips, text data still contribute the major part of information about the pages. Therefore, it is not surprising that most of automatic hypertext construction methods inherit from traditional information retrieval research. In this work, we will propose a new automatic hypertext construction method based on a text mining approach. Our method applies the self-organizing map algorithm to cluster some at text documents in a training corpus and generate two maps. We then use these maps to identify the sources and destinations of some important hyperlinks within these training documents. The constructed hyperlinks are then inserted into the training documents to translate them into hypertext form. Such translated documents will form the new corpus. Incoming documents can also be translated into hypertext form and added to the corpus through the same approach. Our method had been tested on a set of at text documents collected from a newswire site. Although we only use Chinese text documents, our approach can be applied to any documents that can be transformed to a set of index terms.