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WebWatcher: A Learning Apprentice for the World Wide Web
Robert Armstrong, Dayne Freitag, Thorsten Joachims, and Tom
Mitchell
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
Thu Feb 9 16:27:45 EST 1995
Abstract:
We describe an information seeking assistant for the world wide web. This
agent, called WebWatcher, interactively helps users locate desired information
by employing learned knowledge about which hyperlinks are likely to lead to
the target information. Our primary focus to date has been on two issues: (1)
organizing WebWatcher to provide interactive advice to Mosaic users while
logging their successful and unsuccessful searches as training data, and (2)
incorporating machine learning methods to automatically acquire knowledge for
selecting an appropriate hyperlink given the current web page viewed by the
user and the user's information goal. We describe the initial design of
WebWatcher, and the results of our preliminary learning experiments.
Thorsten Joachims
Thu Feb 9 16:27:34 EST 1995