The World-Wide Web provides its users almost unlimited accesses to the documents on the Internet. We suggest to use intelligent agents to assist users to locate documents related to their interests instead of browsing the Web via primitive search engines. We identify a number of key components in such intelligent systems and propose a system architecture. In particular, we have designed a learning agent and the underlying algorithms for the discovery of areas of interest from the user access logs. The discovered topics can be used to improve the efficiency of information retrieval by prefetching documents for the users and store them in a document database in the system. We have also implemented a prototype system to illustrate the various concepts. Experiments are performed which shows that the areas of interest discovered can in fact be used to improve the efficiency of information retrieval on a distributed information system such as the Internet.
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