Gaz-Guide: Agent-Mediated Information Retrieval for Official Gazettes

Information retrieval tasks concerns with leading the user to those documents that best match his/her information needs. We consider missing concepts and wrong terms in user query as the fundamental problem of information retrieval. We propose a multiagent system that assists information retrieval by mediating the user's information needs and the semantic structure of the data domain. The multiagent system embeds both ontology and thesauri to traverse different cognitive spaces. During an interactive process, the user's query is transformed and led to appropriate semantic constructs that enable effective retrieval. We consider the data domain of government official gazettes. A prototype system, Gaz-Guide, has been developed and experiments are conducted by recording system response to real users with practical questions. The initial results show encouraging sign of the utility and effectiveness of Gaz-Guide in articulating domain resources on thesauri and ontology and guiding users with interactive assistance.

[1]  Katia P. Sycara,et al.  The RETSINA multiagent system (video session): towards integrating planning, execution and information gathering , 1998, AGENTS '98.

[2]  Vipul Kashyap,et al.  InfoSleuth: agent-based semantic integration of information in open and dynamic environments , 1997, SIGMOD '97.

[3]  William A. Woods,et al.  Conceptual Indexing: Practical Large-Scale AI for Efficient Information Access , 2000, AAAI/IAAI.

[4]  Prabhakar Raghavan,et al.  Information retrieval algorithms: a survey , 1997, SODA '97.

[5]  Koichi Takeda,et al.  Information retrieval on the web , 2000, CSUR.

[6]  Kristian J. Hammond,et al.  Guiding people to information: providing an interface to a digital library using reference as a basis for indexing , 2000, IUI '00.

[7]  Timothy W. Finin,et al.  KQML as an agent communication language , 1994, CIKM '94.

[8]  Ramana Rao,et al.  Rich interaction in the digital library , 1995, CACM.

[9]  Nicholas R. Jennings,et al.  Intelligent agents: theory and practice , 1995, The Knowledge Engineering Review.

[10]  Gio Wiederhold,et al.  Mediation in information systems , 1995, CSUR.

[11]  Katia Sycara,et al.  The RETSINA Multiagnet System: Towards Integrating Planning, Execution and Information Gathering. , 1998 .

[12]  Jeffrey M. Bradshaw,et al.  Software agents , 1997 .

[13]  Edmund H. Durfee,et al.  The agent architecture of the Univercity of Michingan Digital Library , 1997, IEE Proc. Softw. Eng..

[14]  Marti A. Hearst.  Interfaces for Searching the Web , 1997, Scientific American.

[15]  Nicholas J. Belkin,et al.  Cognitive models and information transfer , 1984 .

[16]  Shivakumar Vaithyanathan,et al.  Exploiting clustering and phrases for context-based information retrieval , 1997, SIGIR '97.

[17]  Sergey Brin,et al.  The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine , 1998, Comput. Networks.

[18]  Michael McGill,et al.  Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval , 1983 .

[19]  C. Lee Giles,et al.  CiteSeer: an automatic citation indexing system , 1998, DL '98.

[20]  Robert B. Allen,et al.  User Models: Theory, Method, and Practice , 1990, Int. J. Man Mach. Stud..