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Design and evaluation of a multi-agent collaborative Web mining system

Chau, Michael and Zeng, Daniel and Chen, Hsinchun and Huang, Michael and Hendriawan, David (2003) Design and evaluation of a multi-agent collaborative Web mining system. Decision Support Systems 35(1):pp. 167-183.

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Abstract

Most existing Web search tools work only with individual users and do not help a user benefit from previous search experiences of others. In this paper, we present the Collaborative Spider, a multi-agent system designed to provide post-retrieval analysis and enable across-user collaboration in Web search and mining. This system allows the user to annotate search sessions and share them with other users. We also report a user study designed to evaluate the effectiveness of this system. Our experimental findings show that subjects’ search performance was degraded, compared to individual search scenarios in which users had no access to previous searches, when they had access to a limited number (e.g., 1 or 2) of earlier search sessions done by other users. However, search performance improved significantly when subjects had access to more search sessions. This indicates that gain from collaboration through collaborative Web searching and analysis does not outweigh the overhead of browsing and comprehending other users’ past searches until a certain number of shared sessions have been reached. In this paper, we also catalog and analyze several different types of user collaboration behavior observed in the context of Web mining.

EPrint Type:Journal Article (Paginated)
Keywords:National Science Digital Library, NSDL, Artificial Intelligence Lab, AI Lab, Web searching; Web content mining; Collaborative information retrieval; Collaboration behavior; Collaborative filtering; Multiagent systems; Software agents; Post-retrieval analysis
Subjects:Web Mining
Internet
ID Code:411
Deposited On:16 August 2004
Alternative Locations:http://ai.bpa.arizona.edu/go/papers.html
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