Make Any Collection Navigable: Methods for Constructing and Evaluating Hypergraph of Text
2026-04-28 • Information Retrieval
Information Retrieval
AI summaryⓘ
The authors explore how to make any group of documents easier to explore by connecting them like web pages with hyperlinks. They introduce the idea of building a Hypergraph of Text (HoT), a special structure that maps these connections for better navigation. They also create a new way to measure how good these connections are, called the effort ratio. Their tests show that even simple methods work as well as advanced AI approaches using this new measurement.
Hypergraph of TextHypergraphTF-IDFLarge Language ModelsHyperlinksSemantic structureEffort ratioNavigationText corpus
Authors
Dean E. Alvarez, ChengXiang Zhai
Abstract
One reason the Web is more useful than a simple collection of documents is that the structure created by hyperlinks enables flexible navigation from one web page to another. However, hyperlinks are typically created manually and cannot fully capture a corpus' implicit semantic structures. Is there a general way to make an arbitrary collection navigable? Recent work has formalized this problem generally as constructing a Hypergraph of Text (HoT), which provides a formal mathematical structure for supporting navigation and browsing. However, how to construct and evaluate a Hypergraph of Text remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose and study several methods for constructing a HoT. We also propose a novel quantitative metric, effort ratio, for evaluating the structural quality of a constructed HoT. Experimental results show that even simple TF-IDF baselines can match LLM-based methods on our proposed effort ratio metric.