Internet navigation using soft hyperlinks

Abstract

A system for internet navigation using soft hyperlinks is disclosed, in connection with an illustrative information retrieval system with which it may be used. The navigation tool provides freedom to move through a collection of electronic documents independent of any hyperlink which has been inserted within an HTML page. A user can click on any term in a document page, not only those that are hyperlinked. For example, when a user clicks on an initial word within the document, the disclosed system employs a search engine in the background to retrieve a list of related terms. In an illustrative embodiment, a compass-like display appears with pointers indicating the first four terms returned by the search engine. These returned terms have the highest degree of correlation with the initial search term in a lexical knowledge base that the search engine constructs automatically. The disclosed system allows the user to move from the current document to one of a number of document lists which cover different associations between the initial word clicked on by the user and other terms extracted from within the retrieved list of related terms. The disclosed system may further allow the user to move to a document that is considered most related to the initial word clicked on by the user, or to a list of documents that are relevant to a phrase or paragraph selection indicated by the user within the current page.