SemLink: A Semantic-Aware Automated Test Oracle for Hyperlink Verification using Siamese Sentence-BERTDistinguished Paper Award
Web applications rely heavily on hyperlinks to connect disparate information resources. However, the dynamic nature of the web leads to link rot, where targets become unavailable, and more insidiously, semantic drift, where a valid HTTP 200 connection exists, but the target content no longer aligns with the source context. Traditional verification tools, which primarily function as crash oracles by checking HTTP status codes, often fail to detect semantic inconsistencies, thereby compromising web integrity and user experience. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer semantic understanding, they suffer from high latency, privacy concerns, and prohibitive costs for large-scale regression testing. In this paper, we propose \textbf{SemLink}, a novel automated test oracle for semantic hyperlink verification. SemLink leverages a Siamese Neural Network architecture powered by a pre-trained Sentence-BERT (SBERT) backbone to compute the semantic coherence between a hyperlink’s source context (anchor text, surrounding DOM elements, and visual features) and its target page content. To train and evaluate our model, we introduce the \textbf{Hyperlink-Webpage Positive Pairs (HWPPs)} dataset, a rigorously constructed corpus of over 60,000 semantic pairs. Our evaluation demonstrates that SemLink achieves a Recall of 96.00%, comparable to state-of-the-art LLMs (GPT-5.2), while operating approximately 47.5 times faster and requiring significantly fewer computational resources. This work bridges the gap between traditional syntactic checkers and expensive generative AI, offering a robust and efficient solution for automated web quality assurance.
Thu 21 MayDisplayed time zone: Seoul change
15:00 - 16:30 | UI Accessibility & Automated OraclesResearch Papers at Room 101 Chair(s): Shifat Sahariar Bhuiyan Università della Svizzera italiana | ||
15:00 25mTalk | Lost in Navigation: Detecting Keyboard Navigation Accessibility Issues in Web Pages Research Papers Robert Winn University of Southern California, USA, Paul T. Chiou University of Southern California, William G.J. Halfond University of Southern California | ||
15:25 25mTalk | SemLink: A Semantic-Aware Automated Test Oracle for Hyperlink Verification using Siamese Sentence-BERTDistinguished Paper Award Research Papers Guan-Yan Yang National Taiwan University, Wei-Ling Wen National Taiwan University, Shu Yuan Ku National Taiwan University, Farn Wang National Taiwan University, Kuo-Hui Yeh National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University Pre-print | ||
15:50 25mTalk | A Linguistically Motivated Automated Testing Framework For ASR Accent-Robustness Research Papers Margot Masson University College Dublin, Thomas Laurent Lero@Trinity College Dublin, Anthony Ventresque School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin & Research Ireland Lero | ||