17. An apparatus for identifying a table of contents in a document, the apparatus comprising: a process, comprising: a text fragmenter that derives an ordered sequence of text fragments from the document; a links identifier that defines links between pairs of text fragments satisfying a textual similarity criterion, each link including a source text fragment and a target text fragment; a candidate table of contents selector that selects a plurality of candidate tables of contents, each candidate including a contiguous sub-sequence of the ordered sequence of text fragments that potentially can satisfy criteria including at least an ordering criterion and a non-self-referencing criterion; a table of contents selector that selects one of the candidate tables of contents; and a links optimizer that selects optimized links for text fragments defining entries of the selected table of contents, the optimized links satisfying the ordering criterion and the non-self-referencing criterion.
17. An apparatus for identifying a table of contents in a document, the apparatus comprising: a process, comprising: a text fragmenter that derives an ordered sequence of text fragments from the document; a links identifier that defines links between pairs of text fragments satisfying a textual similarity criterion, each link including a source text fragment and a target text fragment; a candidate table of contents selector that selects a plurality of candidate tables of contents, each candidate including a contiguous sub-sequence of the ordered sequence of text fragments that potentially can satisfy criteria including at least an ordering criterion and a non-self-referencing criterion; a table of contents selector that selects one of the candidate tables of contents; and a links optimizer that selects optimized links for text fragments defining entries of the selected table of contents, the optimized links satisfying the ordering criterion and the non-self-referencing criterion. 19. The apparatus as set forth in claim 17 , wherein the non-self-referencing criterion requires that for a set of entries {#i 1 , #i 2 , #i 3 , . . . } having a set of links {(#i 1 ,#j 1 ), (#i 2 ,#j 2 ), (#i 3 ,#j 3 ), . . . }, the set of entries {#i 1 , #i 2 , #i 3 , . . . } and the corresponding set of target text fragments {#j 1 , #j 2 , #j 3 , . . . } should have an empty intersection.