Learning Information Retrieval Agents: Experiments with Automated Web Browsing

Information Gathering from Heterogeneous, Distributed Environments

Volume

Papers from the 1995 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

The current exponential growth of the Internet precipitates a need for new tools to help people cope with the volume of information. To complement recent work on creating searchable indexes of the World-Wide Web and systems for filtering incoming e-mail and Usenet news articles, we describe a system which helps users keep abreast of new and interesting information. Every day it presents a selection of interesting web pages. The user evaluates each page, and given this feedback the system adapts and attempts to produce better pages the following day. We present some early results from an AI programming class to whom this was set as a project, and then describe our current implementation. Over the course of 24 days the output of our system was compared to both randomly-selected and human-selected pages. It consistently performed better than the random pages, and was better than the human-selected pages half of the time.