Automatic Transformation of linear Text into Hypertext

Technical products are often shipped with voluminous documentations. As to complex software products, machine-readable manuals are provided in most cases in addition to the printed version of a documentation. Although electronically stored text has many advantages in contrast to the traditional medium “paper”, the question arises how to manage the text of an online documentation. If the fact is taken into consideration that a documentation contains a great number of cross references that make the user aware of the interdependencies in the text, the application of a hypertext system seems suitable for making the knowledge included in the documentation accessible. Hypertext systems manage text in a non-linear fashion, i.e. in pieces of knowledge interconnected by logical links. However, an enormous manual and intellectual efl’ort is necessary so far to convert already existing texts for a hypertext system. These considerations led to the development of a new hypertext system called “HyperMan’. It has in addition to the usual parts of such a system a special component that is able to recognize dependencies and relations in a given linear text (or in a collection of linear texts of the same field), thus making the given material useful for a hypertext system. In this paper, we describe how the special component works. Details of the node generation process are explained and a link generating method based on information retrieval techniques will be proposed.