User evaluation of automatically generated semantic hypertext links in a heavily used procedural manual

This paper is an interim report on our efforts at NIST to construct an information discovery tool through the fusion of hypertext and information retrieval (IR) technologies. The tool works by parsing a contiguous document base into smaller documents and inserting semantic links between these documents using document–document similarity measures based on IR techniques. The focus of the paper is a case study in which domain experts evaluate the utility of the tool in the performance of information discovery tasks on a large, dynamic procedural manual. The results of the case study are discussed, and their implications for the design of large-scale automatic hypertext generation systems are described.