Abstract
We describe systems that use machine learning methods to retrieve and/or extract textual information from the Web. In particular, we present our Wisconsin Adaptive Web Assistant (Wawa),which constructs a Web agent by accepting user preferences in form of instructions and adapting the agent’s behavior as it encounters new information. Our approach enables Wawa to rapidly build instructable and self-adaptive Web agents for both the information retrieval (IR) and information extraction (IE) tasks. Wawa uses two neural networks, which provide adaptive capabilities for its agents. User-provided instructions are compiled into these neural networks and are modified via training examples. Users can create these training examples by rating pages that Wawa retrieves, but more importantly our system uses techniques from reinforcement learning to internally create its own examples. Users can also provide additional instruction throughout the life of an agent. Empirical results on several domains show the advantages of our approach.
This work was done while the first author was at the Computer Sciences Department of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
This research was supported in part by NLM Grant 1 R01 LM07050-01, NSF Grant IRI-9502990, and UW Vilas Trust.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Aho A., Sethi R., Ullman, J. (1986). Compilers, Principles, Techniques and Tools,Addison Wesley.
Bikel D., Schwartz R., Weischedel R. (1999). An Algorithm That Learns What’s in a Name, Machine Learning: Special Issue on Natural Language Learning, 34, 211–231.
Brill E. (1994). Some advances in rule-based part of speech tagging, Proc. of AAAI-94 Conference, 722–727.
Brin S., Page L. (1998). The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine. Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 30, 107–117.
Califf M.E. (1998). Relational Learning Techniques for Natural Language Information Extraction. Ph.D. Thesis, Department of Computer Sciences, University of Texas, Austin, TX.
Craven M., Kumlien J. (1999). Constructing biological knowledge-bases by extracting information from text sources, Proc. of ISMB-99, 77–86.
Cristianini N., Shawe-Taylor J. (2000). An Introduction to Support Vector Machines and Other Kernel-Based Learning Methods,Cambridge University Press.
Dempster A., Laird N., Rubin D. (1977). Maximum Likelihood from Incomplete Data via the EM Algorithm, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 39, 1–38.
Drummond C., Ionescu D., Holte R. (1995). A learning agent that assists the browsing of software libraries, Technical Report TR-95–12, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada.
Eliassi-Rad T., (2001). Building Intelligent Agents that Learn to Retrieve and Extract Information, Ph.D. Thesis, Computer Sciences Department. University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI.
Eliassi-Rad T., Shavlik J. (2001). A system for building intelligent agents that learn to retrieve and extract information, Appears in the International Journal on User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, Special Issue on User Modeling and Intelligent Agents
Eliassi-Rad T., Shavlik J. (2001). A theory-refinement approach to information extraction. Proc. of ICML-01 Conference, 130–137.
Feldman R., Liberzon Y., Rosenfeld B., Schier J., Stoppi J. (2000). A framework for specifying explicit bias for revision of approximate information extraction rules. Proc. Of KDD-00 Conference, 189–197.
Freitag D. (1998). Machine Learning for Information Extraction in Informal Domains, Ph.D. thesis, Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.
Freitag D., McCallum A. (1999). Information extraction with HMMs and shrinkage, Workshop Notes of AAAI-99 Conference on Machine Learning for Information Extraction, 31–36.
Freitag D., Kushmerick N. (2000). Boosted wrapper induction, Proc. AAAI-00 Conference, 577–583.
Goecks J., Shavlik J. (2000). Learning users’ interests by unobtrusively observing their normal behavior, Proc. of IUI-2000, 129–132.
Joachims T., Freitag D., Mitchell T. (1997). WebWatcher: A tour guide for the World Wide Web, Proc. of IJCAI-97 Conference, 770–775.
Kushmerick N. (2000). Wrapper Induction: Efficiency and expressiveness, Artificial Intelligence, 118, 15–68.
Leek T., (1997). Information Extraction Using Hidden Markov Models, Masters Thesis, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, San Diego.
Lieberman H. (1995). Letzia: An agent that assists Web browsing, Proc. of IJCAI-95 Conference, 924–929.
McCallum A., Rosenfeld R., Mitchell T. (1998). Improving text classification by shrinkage in a hierarchy of classes, Proc. of ICML-98 Conference, 359367.
McCallum A., Nigam K. (1998). A comparison of event models for naive Bayes text classification, Workshop Notes of AAAI-98 Conference on Learning for Text Categorization, 41–48.
McCallum A., Nigam K., Rennie J., Seymore K. (1999c). Building domain-specific search engines with machine learning techniques, AAAI-99 Spring Symposium, Stanford University, CA, 28–39.
Maclin R., Shavlik, J. (1996). Creating Advice-Taking Reinforcement Learners, Machine Learning, 22, 251–281.
Mitchell T. (1997). Machine Learning,McGraw-Hill.
National Library of Medicine (2001). The MEDLINE Database,http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/.
Ourston D., Mooney R. (1994). Theory Refinement: Combining Analytical and Empirical Methods. Artificial Intelligence, 66, 273–309.
Pazzani M., Kibler D. (1992). The Utility of Knowledge in Inductive Learning. Machine Learning, 9, 57–94.
Pazzani M., Muramatsu J., Billsus D., (1996). Syskill and Webert: Identifying interesting Web sites. Proc. of AAAI-96 Conference, 54–61.
Ray S., Craven M. (2001). Representing sentence structure in hidden Markov models for information extraction, Proc. of IJCAI-01 Conference.
Rennie J., McCallum A. (1999). Using reinforcement learning to spider the Web efficiently, Proc. of ICML-99 Conference.
Riloffe E. (1998).The Sundance Sentence Analyzer ,http://www.cs.utah.edu/projects/n1p/.
Rumelhart D., Hinton G., Williams R. (1986). Learning internal representations by error propagation. In: D. Rumelhart and J. McClelland (eds.), Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition, Vol. 1. MIT Press, 318–363.
Russell S., Norvig P. (1995). Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach,Prentice Hall.
Schapire R., Singer Y. (1998). Improved boosting algorithms using confidence-rated predictions, Proc. COLT-98 Conference
Selman B., Kautz H., Cohen B. (1996). Local Search Strategies for Satisfiability Testing. DIMACS Series in Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical CS, 26, 521–531.
Seymore K., McCallum A., Rosenfeld R. (1999). Learning hidden Markov model structure for information extraction Workshop Notes of AAAI-99 Conference on Machine Learning for Information Extraction, 37–42.
Shakes J., Langheinrich M., Etzioni O. (1997). Dynamic reference sifting: A case stury in the homepage domain, Proc. of WWW-97 Conference, 189–200.
Shavlik J., Eliassi-Rad T. (1998). Intelligent agents for web-based tasks: An advice-taking approach, Workshop Notes of AAAI-98 Conference on Learning for Text Categorization, Madison, WI, 63–70.
Shavlik J., Calcari S., Eliassi-Rad T., Solock J. (1999). An instructable, adaptive interface for discovering and monitoring information on the World-Wide Web, Proc. of IUI-99 Conference, 157–160.
Soderland S. (1997). Learning to extract text-based information from the World Wide Web, Proc. of KDD-97 Conference, 251–254.
Soderland S. (1999). Learning Information Extraction Rules for Semi-Structured and Free Text, Machine Learning: Special Issue on Natural Language Learning, 34, 233–272.
Sutton R.S., Barto A.G. (1998). Reinforcement Learning,MIT Press.
Towell G.G., Shavlik J.W. (1994). Knowledge-Based Artificial Neural Networks. Artificial Intelligence, 70, 119–165.
van Rijsbergen C.J. (1979). Information Retrieval,Buttersworths. 2nd edition.
Yang Y. (1999). An Evaluation of Statistical Approaches to Text Categorization, Journal of Information Retrieval, 1, 67–88.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Eliassi-Rad, T., Shavlik, J. (2003). Intelligent Web Agents that Learn to Retrieve and Extract Information. In: Szczepaniak, P.S., Segovia, J., Kacprzyk, J., Zadeh, L.A. (eds) Intelligent Exploration of the Web. Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing, vol 111. Physica, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7908-1772-0_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7908-1772-0_16
Publisher Name: Physica, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-7908-2519-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-7908-1772-0
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive