The Virtual Library Secretary: A User Model-Based Software Agent

摘要

A user model comprises knowledge of the user's past and present tasks, and is the essential element in adaptive user interfaces. Through the propagation of user models, we can take the user models into the world of software agents, and thus construct user model-based software agents. The user model approach reduces the threats of software agents penetrating a local host and the amount of data transferred. This paper presents the Virtual Library Secretary, which is a user model-based software agent system. The Virtual Library Secretary offers information retrieval and information filtering to the user. The system is part of the Virtual Secretary project. The user model is established by a simple neural network. In this way, the agent is able to learn and adapt to the user's behaviour. This paper discusses the user model concept, presents the Virtual Secretary system architecture and describes how this architecture works through the Virtual Library Secretary.