On automatic similarity linking in digital libraries

Hypertext links are a powerful extension of standard information retrieval techniques based on query languages. However the generation of links is often impractical due to large manual and/or computational effort. We analyze the effects of two main approaches that aim at a restriction of the necessary efforts: the direct use of OCR-processed documents instead of manually post-processed, i.e. corrected documents; and the use of shorter excerpts of documents instead of complete documents. For our tests, similarity links were computed based on the vector-space model; the links that are generated based on unmodified OCR documents and excerpts of documents are then compared to those links that are generated based on complete documents without OCR errors