Project MLEXAI: applying machine learning to web document classification

We present work on project MLExAI, funded by the National Science Foundation with a goal of unifying the artificial intelligence (AI) course around the theme of machine learning. Our work involves the development, implementation, and testing of an adaptable framework for the presentation of core AI topics that emphasizes the relationship between AI and computer science. A suite of adaptable hands-on laboratory projects that can be closely integrated into a one-term AI course and which would supplement introductory AI texts has been developed. The paper focuses on one of these projects, how it meets our goal, and presents our experiences using it. The project involves the development of a learning system for web document classification. Students investigate the process of classifying hypertext documents, called tagging, and apply machine learning techniques and data mining tools for automatic tagging. A summary of our experiences using the projects during four course offerings over the last two years are also presented.