Publication - BIG: A Resource-Bounded Information Gathering Agent

Authors: Lesser, Victor R., Horling, Bryan, Klassner, Frank, Raja, Anita, Wagner, Thomas A., Zhang, Shelley X.Q.
Title: BIG: A Resource-Bounded Information Gathering Agent
Abstract: Effective information gathering on the WWW is a complex task requiring planning, scheduling, text processing, and interpretation-style reasoning about extracted data to resolve inconsistencies and to refine hypothesis about the data. This paper describes the rationale, architecture, and implementation of a next generation information gathering system - a system that integrates several areas of AI research under a single research umbrella. The goal of this system is to exploit the vast amount of information sources available today on the NII including a growing number of digital libraries, independent news agencies, government agencies, as well as human experts providing a variety of services. The large number of information sources and their different levels of accessibility, reliability and associated costs present a complex information gathering coordination problem. Our solution is an information gathering agent, BIG, that plans to gather information to support a decision process, reasons about the resource trade-offs of different possible gathering approaches, extracts information from both unstructured and structured documents, and uses the extracted information to refine its search and processing activities.
Keywords: BIG
Publication: Proceedings of the Fifteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-98).
Date: January 1998
Sources: PS: ftp://ftp.cs.umass.edu/pub/techrept/techreport/1998/UM-CS-1998-003.ps
PDF: /Documents/UM-CS-1998-003.pdf
Notes: Also available as UMass Computer Science Technical Report 1998-03
Reference: Lesser, Victor R., Horling, Bryan, Klassner, Frank, Raja, Anita, Wagner, Thomas A., Zhang, Shelley X.Q.. BIG: A Resource-Bounded Information Gathering Agent. Proceedings of the Fifteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-98).. January 1998. Also available as UMass Computer Science Technical Report 1998-03
bibtex: 
@article{Lesser-9,
  author    = "Victor R. Lesser and Bryan Horling and Frank
               Klassner and Anita Raja and Thomas A. Wagner and
               Shelley X.Q. Zhang",
  title     = "{BIG: A Resource-Bounded Information Gathering
               Agent}",
  journal   = "Proceedings of the Fifteenth National Conference
               on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-98).",
  month     = "January",
  year      = "1998",
  url       = "http://mas.cs.umass.edu/paper/9",
}