Publication - A Multi-agent Approach for Peer-to-Peer based Information Retrieval System

Authors: Zhang, Haizheng; Croft, Bruce; Levine, Brian; and Lesser, Victor
Title: A Multi-agent Approach for Peer-to-Peer based Information Retrieval System
Abstract: This paper develops and analyzes distributed search techniques for use in a peer-to-peer (P2P) network-based Information Retrieval (IR) system. In the absence of a centralized mediator with global knowledge that directs requests to appropriate agents, agents must cooperate to forward the queries among themselves so as to find appropriate agents, and return and merge the results in order to fulfill the information retrieval task in a distributed environment. In our approach, the agent society is connected through an agent-view structure maintained by each agent. Initially, the agent-view structures are formed by agents connecting to each other randomly. However, we show that such an approach can be significantly enhanced by dynamically reorganizing the underlying agent-view topology and deploying context-sensitive distributed search algorithms. Experimental results indicate that appropriate organizational structures and distributed search mechanisms can have a positive influence on system performance.
Keywords: Information Retrieval
Publication: Proceedings of Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems, pp. 456 - 464
Location: NYC
Date: 2004
Sources: PDF: /Documents/p456.pdf
Reference: Zhang, Haizheng; Croft, Bruce; Levine, Brian; and Lesser, Victor. A Multi-agent Approach for Peer-to-Peer based Information Retrieval System. Proceedings of Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems, pp. 456-464. 2004.
bibtex: 
@inproceedings{Zhang-358,
  author    = "Haizheng Zhang and Bruce Croft and Brian Levine
               and Victor Lesser",
  title     = "{A Multi-agent Approach for Peer-to-Peer based
               Information Retrieval System}",
  booktitle = "Proceedings of Third International Joint
               Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent
               Systems",
  pages     = "456-464",
  year      = "2004",
  address   = "NYC",
  url       = "http://mas.cs.umass.edu/paper/358",
}