WebMate: A Personal Agent for Browsing and Searching

The World-Wide Web is developing very fast. Currently, nding useful information on the Web is a time consuming process. In this paper, we present WebMate, an agent that helps users to e ectively browse and search the Web. WebMate extends the state of the art in Web-based information retrieval in many ways. First, it uses multiple TF-IDF vectors to keep track of user interests in di erent domains. These domains are automatically learned by WebMate. Second, WebMate uses the Trigger Pair Model to automatically extract keywords for re ning document search. Third, during search, the user can provide multiple pages as similarity relevance guidance for the search. The system extracts and combines relevant keywords from these relevant pages and uses them for keyword re nement. Using these techniques, WebMate provides e ective browsing and searching help and also compiles and sends to users personal newspaper by automatically spiding news sources. We have experimentally evaluated the performan...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: AGENTS
• Authors: Liren Chen, Katia P. Sycara
• Keywords: AGENTS 1998, Di Erent Domains, Multiple Tf-idf Vectors, Security Privacy, Time Consuming Process