Hyperlinks:
keywords or key words
Goal
• To examine the inherent keyness of hyperlinks
• To compare hyperlinks to statistical keywords
• Do hyperlinks correspond with the statistical
keywords?
• Case study: examination of hypertextual fiction
Statistical keywords
• Keywords analysis
– Effective and useful method for determination and
identification the discourse topic of texts
• Keywords identification
– Perform by using statistical methods
– Appear differeneces against human cognitive
proccesing
– Humans make interpretative observations and
understand the keyness in qualitative rather than
quantitative point of view
Hyperlinks
• Salient type of reference
• Hightlighting lexical strings from texts, which lead
readers to another relating text
• Easy navigation by using hypelinks
• Shifting of discourse topics
• When author wants to provide additional information
Cataphoricity
• Type of referentiality
• Word refers to something in the text = hyperlink
• Creation:
1. The link element refers from the source to the target
fragment (see next slide example)
2. The link element describes the target fragment in some
way
Cataphoricity creation - example
Notes
Unless author of hypertext chooses systematic
approach for logic linking, reader can NOT know
which type should expect
Semantically filled link
• This term describes hyperlinks, that refer
explicitly to an identifiable referent
• Proper and concrete nouns form referentially
more or less straighforward bridges
• Abstact nouns require more mental processing
• Verbs, adjectives and adverbs present increasing
referential challenges
– do not use as a links in hypertexts
Semantically filled link
• Which one is easirer to envision the potential
referent of the link?
Example 1: John, the moon
Example 2: jealousy, quickly
Question?
Hyperlinks should be consider key words in a
hypetext?
Keyness definiton
Scott & Tribble
A quality words may have in a given text or set of
texts, suggensting that they are important, they
reflect what the text is really about, avoiding trivia
and insignificant details.
Hyperlinks vs. Key words
If hyperlinks mostly saliently communitaces the core
information content, we can surmise that hyperlinks
can be demmed as key words
A contrastive case study
• Examination of hypertextual fiction called The
Heist (author W. Sorrells)
• All fragments were compiled as a corpus
• Keywords analysis was performed on each
fragment using WordSmith tool version 4.0
• British National Corpus was used as reference
corpus
A contrastive case study
• All hyperlinks were extracted from structural
maps cerated on Cmap Tools
• Comparison of the hyperlinks to the keywords
lists of source and target fragments
Results
Lexical cohesion:
• repetition, reiteration co-reference of
collocation was found between hyperlinks and
target fragment
In 88 % of cases
Results
Discource topical linking
• Hyperlink functioning as a descriptive label of
the events depicted in target fragment
Graph
Only 1 % of hyperlinks show no apparent cohesive continuity at all.
List of hyperlinks
List of keywords
Results
• There appear a lot of multiword links
• Proper names identify all of major characters
in the story
• Hyperlinks evokes ideas of criminal activity,
the police, ….
• Repetition of certain words (highly, suit,..)
– They may possess particular keyness in text
Results
• The hyperlinks list gives more comprehensive
impression of the texts aboutness than
statistical keywords
• Lexical items of hyperlinks match the
keywords of
• The target fragment 31 %
• The source fragment 23 %
Conclusion
• Case study do NOT provide enough empirical
evidence
• Suggest that the keyness concept can be
employed in the hypertext analysis
• Hyperlinks can be considered a surface level
equivalent to statistically derived keywords
Conclusion
• Hyperlinks represent subjectively evaluated
key elements of story
• Hyperlinks of individual text fragments do
NOT exhibit a high level of correspondence
with statistical keywords
Conclusion
• Hyperlinks keyness of hyperlinks demonstrates
the importance of examining on two different
levels
• Hyperlinks are NOT a reliable indicator of the
statistically identified discourse topics
Conclusion
From statistical point of view:
Hyperlinks are key words
but they are NOT keywords