Software Agents for Information Retrieval

11/27/97


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Table of Contents

Software Agents for Information Retrieval

Overview of the Tutorial

Tutorial Objectives

Why Study Agents?

Croft’s Top Ten List

Croft’s Top Ten List (cont.)

The Number Two IR Problem

What’s an agent?

What is an agent? A brief tour of agent-space

What is a software agent?

So, what’s a software agent?

an emerging system-building paradigm

Software Agent Characteristics

Agent Characteristic: Adaptation

Agent Characteristic: Cooperation

Agent Characteristic: Autonomy

Agent Characteristic: Mobility?

Agent Characteristic: Intelligence?

Some key ideas

Agent Theory

Agent Theory

Representation and Reasoning

BDI agent models

Rational Agents

Full vs. Bounded Rationality

Communication

What is a speech act?

Performatives

Econometric models

Artificial life

Machine Learning

Reasoning with Uncertainty

Conclusions

Agent Technology

Agent Technology

Agent Architectures

Agent Architectures

Beyond client-server

Agents vs. MAS

Mediated Architectures

Agent markets and swarms

Agent Programming Systems

Desiderata for Agent programming languages

What are people using

Example -- TKQML

A Sample TKQML Agent

Agent Communication

Agent Communication

Some ACLs

Knowledge Sharing Effort

Knowledge Interchange Format

KIF Syntax and Semantics

Common Semantics Shared Ontologies and Ontolingua

Ontologies

Conceptual Schemas

Ontology Library and Editing Tools

Common Pragmatics

KQML Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language

A KQML Message

Some KQML Performatives

Simple Query Performatives

KQML protocols

KQML Semantics

KQML APIs and System Interfaces

Lockheed/UMBC KQML Software Architecture

KQML Utility Agents

Agent Technology Conclusions

What Do Agents Have To Do With Information Retrieval?

Agents for Information Retrieval

Information Retrieval and Agent Characteristics

Agent-Based Information Retrieval (ABIR) Mind Map

Knowbot ABIR Systems

Example: SavvySearch

Netbot Jango

Netbot Jango

Netbot Jango

Fab -- Adaptive IR

Collaborative Filtration ABIR Systems

Content-based vs. Collaborative Recommendation

How Does Collaborative Filtering Work?

Example: Firefly

SysKill & Webert

Phoaks

Proactive ABIR Systems

Example: Remembrance Agent

Example: Letizia

Example: TopicAGENTs

Adding Semantic Information

Course Ontology

Example

PPT Slide

Large, Heterogeneous Corpora

Basic Agent-based IR Architecture

Key Ideas in Basic Architecture

Issues in the Basic ABIR Architecture

Mediated Agent-based IR Architecture

How Does this Help?

Metadata

SAIRE: Scalable Agent-based Information Retrieval Engine

UMDL: University of Michigan Digital Library

Distributed Intelligent Search Agents

Retsina

Retsina Architecture

Retsina Architecture

Inside a RETSINA Agent

CARROT: Cooperating Agent-based Routing and Retrieval of Text

PPT Slide

CARROT Back-end Agent

CARROT Broker

Telltale

Telltale

Documents as term vectors

n-grams vs. words

ngram-centroids as corpus metadata

Telltale user interface

Visualization

VR based visualization of retrieval

VR Approach

Visualizing a document space

Conclusions

Conclusions

Conclusions

But...

Research Issues

Research Issues (cont.)

What’s needed tomorrow

To Learn More

Tim Finin

James Mayfield

Charles Nicholas

Author: Jim Mayfield

Email: finin@umbc.edu

Home Page: http://umbc.edu/~finin