Emergent document semantics

It is well known that interpretation depends on the context, whether for a work of art, a piece of literature, or a natural language utterance. This paper addresses the dynamic context of a collection of linked multimedia documents, of which the Web is a perfect example. Contextual document semantics emerge through identification of various users' browsing paths though this multimedia collection. In this paper, we present techniques that use multimedia information as part of this determination. Some implications of our approach are presented in the problem of defining the document semantics of a Webpage as well as the semantics that emerges through its use.