Instructible information agents for Web mining
Mathias Bauer, Dietmar Dengler, Gabriele Paul · 2000
Information agents are intended to assist their users in locating relevant information in vast collections of documents like the WWW. In many cases, e.g., when trying to integrate pieces of information from previously unrelated sources, it is not sufficient to merely identify documents containing relevant data. Instead, information agents have to identify the interesting portions of these documents and make them available for further use. This paper deals with the problem of training an information agent to identify and extract interesting pieces of information from online documents. Keywords programming by demonstration, information agents, wrapper induction INTRODUCTION Information agents play an important role in the process of identifying and locating relevant documents in vast, at best semi-structured document collections like the WWW. Their tasks range from directing user queries to a number of online search engines to the filtering of search results or information streams ac...