User Models and Filtering Agents for Improved Internet Information Retrieval

Over the past few years, the amount of electronic information available through the Internet has increased dramatically. Unfortunately, the search tools currently available for retrieving and filtering information in this space are not effective in balancing relevance and comprehensiveness. This paper analyzes the results of experiments in which HTML documents are searched with user models and software agents used as intermediaries to the search. Simple user models are first combined with search specifications (or ‘User Needs’), to define an Enhanced User Need. Then Uniform Resource Agents are constructed to filter information based on the EUN parameters. The results of searches using different agents are then compared to those obtained through a comparable simple keyword search, and it is shown that a user searching a pool of existing agents can obtain better search results than by conducting a traditional keyword search. This work thus demonstrates that the use of user models and information filtering agents do improve search results and may be used to improve Internet information retrieval. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.