Automatically generating hypertext in newspaper articles by computing semantic relatedness

We discuss an automatic method for the construction of hypertext links within and between newspaper articles. The method comprises three steps: determining the lexical chains in a text, building links between the paragraphs of articles, and building links between articles. Lexical chains capture the semantic relations between words that occur throughout a text. Each chain is a set of related words that captures a portion of the cohesive structure of a text. By considering the distribution of chains within an article, we can build links between the paragraphs. By computing the similarity of the chains contained in two different articles, we can decide whether or not to place a link between them. We also describe the results of an evaluation performed to test the methodology.