KELP: A Hypertext oriented User-Interface for an Intelligent Legal Fulltext Information Retrieval System

The second database was a technical paper written in SGML. This document had a deep hierarchical structure. This database consisted of only 3805 nodes and 292 links, but demonstrated the ability to store complex structures, and to display them in various ways, including the implementation of a sh-eye view of the table of contents. The next database will provide an example of a large hyperbase with a fairly complex structure. Again, such a hyperbase would be prohibitively diicult to construct manually. It consists of a large portion of the Commonwealth of Australia's Acts of Parliament, and has a fairly complex structure. It is estimated that this database will consist of 1 million nodes and 10 million links. The cost of installing a new database is worth mentioning. If the text is not already in SGML, format, a grammar must be devised to markup the text in the appropriate way. Next, a grammar needs to be written to allow node creation based on the text structure. The rest of the system is generic, dependent entirely upon the SGML markup, so that enormous savings accrue in the creation of large hypertext databases. 8 Conclusions We have described a system that provides an automatic method for generating richly structured document hyperbases. These hyperbases support both browsing and ranked natural language querying. This has occurred through the successful integration of SGML, hypertext browsing capabilities, sophisticated information retrieval querying techniques, and a nested relational database system. Key beneets are that this system requires minimal manual assistance, and is generically applicable. The use of SGML is a central factor in this. It ooers a suitable representation for document structure that can be used in the conversion of source text into hypertext. By preserving the SGML markup within nodes, re-assembly of document fragments for presentation is easy. The nested relational model proved to be a suitable database engine for such a system since it provides both the capabilities and speed required. Three immediate areas of challenge are hypertext node generation, high-level querying, and query ranking. Node { node, and node { document relationships within source text need to be recognised and converted to explicit links. It remains to incorporate link information into querying, so that use can be made of inter-and intra-document relationships and database and document structure. Also, devising ranking algorithms that take into account the structure and fragmentation of documents would be of immediate beneet. …