Improving the Performance of Existing Information Retrieval Systems Using a Software Agent

摘要

This paper describes a software agent developed specifically for integration with existing information retrieval interfaces and search engines. The software agent assists the user with query reformulation. The agent assistance is based on characteristics of the user population, user actions during the search process, information from retrieved documents, and historical information from past queries. With minor modification, the software agent can be integrated with a variety of interfaces and search engines.