DEBRE BIRHAN UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF COMPUTING
DEPARTMENT OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Information Filtering Agent

By Id:

Eyerusalem Wale PGR(P)/300/12

Melat Nigatu PGR(P)/171/12

Submitted to: Dr. Millon (Ph.D.)

Debre Berhan University, Debre Berhan, Ethiopia

December 2019
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 Topics to be Covered
 Introduction

 Architecture

 Application

 Advantage and disadvantage

 Related research work

 Problem solved

 Approach followed

 Result achieved

 Conclusion

 Strength and weakness

 Recommendation

 References
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 Introduction
 Information filtering: We must go through an enormous amount of

information to find the small portion that is relevant to us.

 Information filtering is closely related to the task of information retrieval.

The information filtering tasks are generally more complex and more
difficult to automate than information retrieval tasks.
 Information retrieval (IR) involves typically queries from relatively static

databases to satisfy punctual information needs.

 Information filtering (IF) refers to selection of data objects from a

continuously changing dynamic stream of information.

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 Cont..
 A more interesting however approach is followed by the

Knowledge Sharing Environment (KSE) system. KSE is a

system of information agents for organizing, summarizing
and sharing knowledge from a number of sources,
including WWW, an organization's intranet or from other
users.

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 cont…
 Information filtering is a particularly important function in KM

because users need a way of filtering this data into a more

manageable situation. Knowledge workers (such as managers,
technical professionals, and marketing personnel) need
information in a timely manner as it can greatly affect their
success.

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 Information Filtering Agents
 Information Filtering agents find the content of interest to a
user.
 Information Filtering agents could gather information from
different sources
 They could filter information based on user’s personal interest
 Information filtering agents may use Information Retrieval
techniques
 Vector space models, where a document is represented as a
vector of attributes.
Tree structure, which represents a hierarchical view of a
document

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 Cont…
 Metrics: The main metrics used to test the accuracy of the
retrieval/ filtering algorithm are precision and recall.
 These are defined as:

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 Example of information-filtering agents
  An advanced bot that finds and categorizes relevant information based on the
Search Pad user’s preferences, also learning from them.

  An agent that carries out Net searches by simultaneously consulting the most
Copernic important search engines 

KOS (Knowledge A new class of intelligent information retrieval Tools built by modeling how
Object Suite) we learn. Cognitive science, collaborative knowledge sharing, and
knowledge modeling that continues where search drops you by “reading” the
knowledge in search results.

NetAttachePro A “second-generation web agent” that features a powerful information

v1.0 filtering Intelligent Agent. It allows and organizes offline browsing.

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 Architecture IF

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 Advantage and disadvantage
Advantage
 To make sense of data
 Reduced information overload
 Information profile
Disadvantage
 number of website rename
 The recommendation based on existing interest of user

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 Building Software Agents for
Information Filtering on the Internet:
A Genetic Programming Approach

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 Introduction
 Now a days, The Internet is one of the largest public available
"databases" of documents.
 Number of services have arisen on the Internet to help users
search and retrieve documents from servers around the world.
 Software robots are autonomous agents that interact with real-
world software environments such as operating systems and the
World Wide Web. Number of software agents have been built to
help users.
 Agents for information gathering on the Internet has to solve at
least two problems in common. The one concerns where and how
the relevant documents are retrieved.
 The other is to determine the preference of documents according
to the current specific interests of the user.

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 Statements of the problem
 A human user to access a wide range of information resources by

stating what he or she wants accomplished.

 Determines how and where to satisfy it.

 Information overload is a worldwide problem today, but

Intelligent Agents help reduce this problem.

 The system should be able to select interesting to the user and

eliminate the rest. Since filtering involves repeated interactions

with the user, the system should be able to identify patterns in the
users behavior.
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 Statements of the problem…
 In this paper we formulate information filtering as a learning

problem and develop a genetic programming approach to this

problem. Given a set of sample documents, genetic programming
evolves a population of agents that specialize to user interests.

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 Methodology
 This study focuses on the six step procedure that involves two
agents cooperate each other i.e search agent and a filtering agent.
1. Initialize the knowledge bases of the search agent and the
filtering agent.
2. The search agent uses his knowledge base to search for
documents on the Internet.
3. The filtering agent uses his own knowledge base to give
preferences to the articles suggested by the search agent.
4. The user reads the articles in a decreasing order of preference
and gives relevance feedback for each document.
5. The filtering agent learns from the relevance feedback and adapt
his knowledge base.
6. Go to step 2.

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 Methodology …
 In simulations, 100 documents were used for evolving agents.

The documents were HTML (HyperText Markup Language)

articles or their excerpts retrieved from the World Wide Web
using Netscape.
 A tree-shaped chromosome is used to represent the knowledge or

rules of a document filtering agent.

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 Experimental Results
 The test domain was the evolutionary computing area. Each document was
given a relevance feedback.
 The relevance feedback is either positive (+1) or negative (-1) and determined
by the user.
 A half of the documents were positive examples and another half were negative
examples.

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 Experimental Results…
The function set consisted of three logical operations:
AND, OR, and NOT. Crossover exchanged the sub trees
of two parents, selected at random. Mutation changed the
terminals and functions at a rate of 0.03 for each node.
Elitist strategy was used in combination with
proportionate selection so that the best individual always
survives the selection.
These agents achieved a 97% performance for the
sample data.

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 Conclusion
 An information filtering system is a system that
removes redundant or unwanted information from an
information stream.

Strength
 To gave valuable information at the limited time.

 The users gate organized and structural information

 Filtering agents is also needed on the search result from

internet search engines.

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 Weakness

 The weakness of information filtering agent can not restrict or

users allow access to unsuitable content like pornography,

promotes alcohol, drugs, crime etc.

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 Recommendation
 The recommendation is if it is possible the information

filtering agent must be restricts or doesn't give access for

users if they want unavailable information.
 Generally we recommend filtering software can eliminate or

at least reduce these problems.

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 References
1. 0. Etzioni, N. Lesh, and R. Segal, Building softbots for UNIX, Technical Report, Dept of
CSE, University of Washington, 1992.
2. 0. Etzioni and D. Weld, A softbot-based interface to the Internet, Communications of the ACM,
37(7):72-76, 1994.
3. J. Horng, B. Liu, and C. Kao, A genetic algorithm for database query optimization, In Proc. of
IEEE Conf. on Evolutionary Computation, IEEE Press, 1994, pp. 350-355.
4. J. R. Koza, Genetic Programming: On the Programming of Computers by Means of Natural
Selection, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.
5. D. Kraft, F. Petry, B. Buckles, and T. Sadasivan, The use of genetic programming to build
queries for .information retrieval, In Proc. of IEEE Conf. on Evolutionary Computation, IEEE
Press, 1994, pp. 468-473.
6. Y. Lashkari, M. Metral, and P. Maes, Collaborative interface

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 THANK YOU!!!

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