Exploiting Latent Semantic Relations in Highly Linked Hypertext for Information Retrieval in Wikis

Good hypertext writing style mandates that link texts clearly indicate the nature of the link target. While this guideline is routinely ignored in HTML, the lightweight markup languages used by wikis encourage or even force hypertext authors to use semantically appropriate link texts. This property of wiki hypertext makes it an ideal candidate for processing with latent semantic analysis, a factor analysis technique for finding latent transitive relations among naturallanguage documents. In this study, we design, implement, and test an LSA-based information retrieval system for wikis. Instead of a full-text index, our system indexes only link texts and document titles. Nevertheless, its precision exceeds that of a popular full-text search engine, and is comparable to that of PageRank-based systems such as Google.