A UserAdaptive Self-Proclamative Multi-Agent
Based Recommendation System Design for
E-Learning Digital Libraries
R. Ponnusamy
Dept. of Computer Science & Engg.
College of Engg., Anna University
Chennai -600025, India
e-mail: r_ponnusamy@hotmail.com
Abstract E-learning, the most modern recent web
application for dissemination of information caters to the needs
of different learning communities. Web digital library is an
instrument that provides various types of information required
for e-learning. It is necessary to formulate a new technique, by
taking into account various user communities and their personal
requirements. This paper describes a new technique for design
and development of a user-interface system called A user
adaptive self-proclamative multi-agent based recommendation
system design for e-learning digital libraries. This system is
mainly designed for research people to collect the research
literature. Basically this is a multi-agent based recommendation
system that provides necessary suggestions by learning user-
personal profiles and actions. The user has the provision to
search the information and while searching, the system
recommends the list of research literature that the user is
interested. The profiles are concept patterned and a concept
matrix is designed to represent each user as well as the subject.
An ACM Computational Review Classification hierarchy along
with conceptual matrix is used to represent the agent internal
semantic model and to support the best inference. It is based on
formulating a concept matrix, which consists of technical phrases
and indexes occurring in the title and abstract of the paper.
These phrases and indexes are picked up from the ACM
computing review classification index, keywords as well as using
phrases of Microsoft on-line computer dictionary. The columns
of the matrix represent phrases and the rows represent the
frequency of occurrences of the specified phrases in the document
or query. The system is also doing concept relativity analysis.
The usage of concept matrix enables the system to
recommend/retrieve the exact information. It does a behavior
prediction for various types of users and builds the user profile
accordingly. It builds a global as well as personal profile. It also
understands the user assistance requirements in various
circumstances and adapts the user accordingly.
KeywordsE-learning, Text Retrieval, Web Digital Libraries,
Multi-Agent System, Concept- Matrix, Concepts.
I. INTRODUCTION
E-learning is the modern information technology
innovation which plays a vital role in recent education and
research development activities. These e-learning methods
involve various categories [1,2,3] which include labware,
1-4244-0023-6/06/$20.00 2006 IEEE
T.V.Gopal
Dept. of Computer Science & Engg.
College of Engg., Anna University
Chennai -600025, India
e-mail : goopal@annauniv.edu
course work, presentation, exposition, on-line course,
assignment and on-line research literature presentation etc.
The formal high-quality on-line literature presentation is the
most important one to aid the researchers of various
communities all over the world to collect various research
literatures. Digital library is the modern social [2,3,4] virtual
institution for information collection, presentation and
dissemination and is instrumental in providing various
categories of e-learning services. The design and development
of digital library requires many issues to be addressed [2- 7]
and it must be able to perform intelligent human oriented tasks
in order to make it highly sophisticated and effective.
The on-line research literature collection is an e-learning
activity in all the research institutions. These literatures are
available in the distributed locations. In IISc* different
departments proposed to develop a research literature
repository to provide on-line research literature to various
science/engineering researchers. This repository stores all the
research literatures viz. research papers, thesis and technical
reports submitted by students and scholars. These literatures
are classified and stored in different department servers. In
order to collect the literature in the specific topic or area, say
for example of computing literature the user has to explicitly go
to the related department server and browse the information
that is needed. Instead the user expects a system that has to
automatically search and present/recommend the specific set of
literature on the desktop from different servers. This is called
as information integration problem [20].
In this case the relevant literature collection from all these
portals together is the most important problem to be solved.
Most of the retrieval system just retrieves the passive results
(retrieve a set of articles) at the time of searching. It is not able
to retrieve the literature if the new literature has been added on
the later period of time. The main advantage of
recommendation system is that it is able to recommend a set of
newly added literature actively even after the searching is over.
Some of the serious usability problems in e-learning and
other web digital libraries are [1] failure to relate the real
world experience of the user, poor presentation of key
information and lack of accessibility even in the most basic
sense. The concept oriented relevant text information retrieval /
CIS 2006
recommendation is the long standing dream of the information
and cognitive scientist. The primary expectation is that if the
user presents any of the phrase or keyword, then the system
must be able to identify the related concepts also. That is the
system must be able to find semantically relevant documents
even if it does not contain all the keywords in the queries. The
e-learning interface must be in a meaningful user-centric way
in order to improve the quality and to solve the above said
problems. There are two critical things very much important for
retrieval / recommendation system. First one is based on the
retrieval algorithm or methodology and the second one is the
user-interface design. In this present approach a LSA based
algorithm is used to support the relevant
retrieval/recommendation. Secondly the user personalization
[8] is the way for the user-centric computing and one of the
important issues that assist the fast, relevant and economical
retrieval of information in the federated or distributed digital
libraries. This user personalization involves a process of
gathering user-information during interaction with the user,
which is then used to deliver appropriate content services,
tailored to make the users needs. This experience is used
better to serve the customer by anticipating needs, making the
interaction efficient and satisfying both parties and to build a
relationship that encourage the customer to come again for
subsequent operations. The main difference between the
customization and personalization is that the customization
occurs when the user can configure an interface and create a
profile manually, adding and removing elements in the profile.
In the process of customization the user profile mapping is
explicit and user driven. In other words, in personalization the
user is seen as being passive, or at least somewhat less in
control. It is the systems responsibility to monitor, analyze
and react to behavior; for example, content offered can be
based on tracking and surfing decisions. A personalized
service need not always be based on the individual user
behavior or user input.
The user personalization can be realized in many user
profile models [9], and the user-personal agent [14] is an
instrument in processing these user personal modeling. The
user profile model determines the human and computer process
in processing the information. These user profile models can
be categorized as Boolean-based model, Similarity-based
model, Vector Space model, Keyword Based model, Structure
based model, X-path model, XML-QL, X-Query, Rule-based
model, Attribute-value etc. Interface agents [11,12,14,16], also
known as personal agents are autonomous software entities that
provide assistance to users. These agents act as human
assistance, collaborating with the user in the same work
environment and becoming more efficient as they learn about
user interests, habits and preferences. Instead of user-initiated
interaction via commands and/or direct manipulation, the user
is engaged in a cooperative process in which both human and
software agents initiate communication, monitor events and
perform tasks. Also, there are many such agents [11-17]
developed in different environments. An attempt has been
made by Daniela Godoy and Analia Amandi to design [11,16]
a personal searcher using intelligent agents. Their extension of
work involves a user profiling architecture [15] for textual
based agents. In another attempt they developed a user
association rule to learn user assistance requirements. D.
Cordero and his team members have developed an Intelligent
Agent for generating personal newspapers [12].
The main user-interface agent interaction personalization
issues [17] are (i) discovering the type of assistance each user
wants. (ii) learning the particular assistance requirements, (iii)
users have different contexts of analyzing users tolerance to
agents errors, (iv) discovering when to interrupt the user, (v)
discovering how much control the user wants to delegate to the
agent and proving the means to provide simple explicit user
feedback, (vi) providing the means to capture as much implicit
feedback, (vii) providing the means to control and inspect agent
behavior. Total personalization is not just to interact with the
user to get some feedback but to understand the user
completely and accordingly establish various sophisticated
actions such as warnings or suggestions or actions without the
interference of the user.
Shahram Rahimi and Norman F. Carver [20] has identified
a suitable domain-specific multi-agent architecture to
distributed information integration. Similar to the way current
information sources are independent information agents are
developed and maintained separately. The goal of each
information agent is to provide information and expertise on a
specific topic by drawing on relevant abstracted information
from other information agents or from servers. To reduce the
level of information processing each agent is designed to
provide expertise on a specific-topic by drawing on relevant
information from other information agents in the related
knowledge domains. Every information agent contains
ontology of its domain of its expertise, its domains model and
its information source models. Each concept matrix together
with the ACM classification represents the ontology. The
ontology consists of descriptions of objects and relationships
(noun, verb phrases). The model provides a semantic
description of the domain, which is used extensively for
processing query.
In this present work, an attempt is made to design and
develop a domain specific (subject specialist) multi-agent
system to support the retrieval/recommendation. This system is
specially designed to aid the researchers to collect the on-line
articles from distributed web servers hosted at different
departments in IISc. The domain specific agent is able to self-
proclaim the related research literature that the user is seeking
about in the specific area. Subsequently the same information is
recommended to the user. Also, the user interface agent is
designed to understand the user in the best way and is able to
initiate different actions under various circumstances.
Section 2 explains the architecture, component and
functionality of the multi-agent system with the design of user-
interface agent. Section 3 explains the user modeling and user
interface design. Section 4 presents the ACM CR Classification
and Automated Concept-Matrix Formulation method. Section 5
presents the method used for concept relativity analysis.
Section 6 gives the implementation as well as experiment
results. Section 7 concludes this paper.
 II. SELF-PROCLAMATIVE MULTI-AGENT
RECOMMENDATION/ SEARCH SYSTEM
In this multi-agent system every individual agent is
designed to the specific domain (Specific Subject) apart from
the agents to be used for the phrase extraction and user-
interaction. The domain-specific agent will take-care of the
identification of documents related to the user requested
phrase.
A phrase-extraction agent will perform the task of technical
phrase extraction. A concept dictionary is attached to the
system to provide a reference to the phrase-extraction agents as
well as to the other domain-specific agents. The architecture of
this multi-agent system is given in figure. 1. After extracting
the technical phrases from the user-query, it is added with the
user-profile and then the concept matrix is reformulated
representing the user intention. Before formulating this concept
matrix the system fixes the searching strategy and accordingly
it formulates the query for different users. Sometimes if the
user wishes to do the rational search then the concept-matrix is
framed with the list of one or two technical phrases. This
concept-matrix is published in the shared memory system
called blackboard. Every domain-specific agent will use the
same for the related document identification. If it finds a list of
documents then it will proclaim the same to the black board
and it will display the same to the user. The domain specific
agent will travel to the various servers and identify the
document that belongs to the subject-hierarchy. Each server is
designed to have a phrase-extraction agent and this will form a
concept matrix after the phrase-extraction. A concept-
dictionary is stored in a centralized place. After framing the
concept matrix for every new query, if a phrase extraction
agent finds the new technical phrase, then it will be updated to
the centralized dictionary. The arrival of the new query is
informed to all servers through moderator as well as the black-
board. Every domain-specific agent is designed to travel
through the different servers to retrieve the user requested
documents. A concept relativity table is maintained in all the
servers as well as the black-board and is updated like concept-
dictionary in every moment. This indicates the movement of
concept-matrix to different servers. This concept relativity table
simply displays category and server number whether it is
related to that or not.
A. Phrase-Extraction Agent
The phrase extraction agent gets the new search query
coming in to the Digital Library from user-interface agent and
then it performs a list of preprocessing steps. These
preprocessing steps involve stop-word elimination, phrase
comparison and phrase matching. The phrase comparison
through the concept dictionary is provided with the system. It is
also doing the phrase matching to eliminate the slight
differences and it will record the same in the concept
dictionary. After extracting the phrase the system will frame
the concept-matrix. Other than the central server there exists a
phrase extraction agent in every individual server.
B. Domain-specific Agents
In this present design there are eleven such agents which
are designed to do the concept matching at the individual first
level hierarchy. For every subject at the first top level it is
designed with a specific agent. Such an agent is taking care of
the concept comparison and identification of relevant
documents related to the user-query. The dispatcher informs
about the arrival of the new query in the blackboard system to
the subject-specific (domain-specific) agents. Immediately the
domain specific agents are actively involved to get the query
from the blackboard and perform the concept relativity analysis
to identify the related documents that are stored in the
department repository. The concept relativity analysis is
performed through the Latent Semantic Analysis. The
algorithm for identification of semantic relativity is explained
in Section 4. After identifying the specific documents, the
individual domain-specific agents are proclaims the related
documents in the blackboard. Then the same is displayed to the
user through the user interface agent.
C. Concept Dictionary
It provides a list of concepts required to run the system. At
the initial stages while starting up the system a list of
independent concepts taken from ACM computing review
classification index, keywords as well as using the words and
phrases of Microsoft on-line computer dictionary are entered
into the system. These phrases and words are entered by the
user through the user interface agent to provide systems
ontology. Later additions of concepts will automatically take-
place after the identification of new technical phrases.
D. User-Interface Agent
User-Interface Agent provides various facilities to learn
about the user. These facilities include Login system, Search
screen, Concept Dictionary, Document Recommendation
window, User-Interaction Window and Help window. This
login system allows the system to identify the user for user
personalization. It is normally designed with a username and
password. The search screen gives the facility for text-input
entry screen for user search, additional and related term entry.
These additional and related terms entry is the optional one, if
the user doesnt want it then he can skip those entries. Second
component is the concept dictionary is as explained the
previous section and here the user has the facility to invoke this
concept dictionary. Third one is the recommendation window,
which recommends different types of new documents related to
the user-interested area as soon as the user login to the system.
Also this interface has the option to upload a new document in
the servers. If a new document comes into the system then it
will be informed through the blackboard. Immediately the
category of that document identified through classification
system. Then the system also recommends that document to the
related user. The user interaction system will interact to get
more information related to search if the user is of interactive
type. A special option is provided to do a rational search,
which means that the system does not consider the user profile
and it will go for searching of its own. At last the help system
gives various details about the operations of the system. The
complete design of this user interface system is explained in
Section 3.
E. Blackboard history is a part of this user profile. The system is designed to
This is a shared memory, which stores and exchanges the learn the users behavior and accordingly behaves in the
query as well as the messages required for different servers. environment. The method of user classification is presented in
The individual domain-specific agents are permitted to section 3.1 and the complete method of building this user
read/write the content of this shared memory. The phrase- access matrix is explained in the following sub-section 3.2.
extraction agent is permitted to write the phrases, concept- After building the user access matrix the system performs the
relativity table entries and new document-hierarchies in this concept relativity analysis to bring the information that is very
shared memory. Also, after retrieving the relevant document much related to the concept. The process of the concept matrix
the domain specific agent will proclaim the same into the building and concept relativity analysis is explained in section
blackboard. 4 and the process of concept relativity analysis is explained in
section 5.
F. Dispatcher
A. User Classifications
It is a simple component that is used to reduce the message
flow increase in the system. The arrival of the new concept in The system is designed to identify the various behaviors of
the system needs to be informed to the domain specific agents different user to adapt the strategy for the recommendation.
explicitly. If you permit individual agent to check the The various types of the user and their required strategies are
blackboard then the system message flow will go to the presented in table 3. The first question is about the interest of
unmanageable level. In order to avoid this situation a simple the user to interact with the agent or not. Sometimes the user
dispatcher is designed. This will watch the arrival of the new may hide the agent and hesitates to interact with the user. An
query in the black board and take care of informing it to all the option is given to hide the agent. Second question is about the
domain-specific agents. interest to listen to the agents suggestion or not. Suppose the
user hides the agent what will be the impact is warned to the
user and if he keep continuously hide the agent then the user
assumed to be ignore the warnings and suggestions. Third is
Server1
PEA Central Server about if the users is patient enough to give complete
UIA information to the agent or not. The user screen has the option
Dispatcher to enter the additional/equivalent string to represent the
LDB LCD
User searchers intention. If he enters this information it is assumed
Black-Board that he is the patient enough to listen to the agent and otherwise
his is not. Fourth is the intention of the agent to take its own
Server2
decision or not. Based on the users understanding the system
PEA
MDSSPA1
decides different strategies for recommendation and searching.
UIA The agents strategy for information, recommendation and
LDB LCD MDSSPA2
searching is given below. This information is learned over a
User period of time. But, normally while starting up, the agent has
the assumption that it has full freedom to take decisions,
interactions, give recommendations and warnings and the user
will present complete set of information.
MDSSPA11
Server n
PEA 1. Agent has to search using the global profiles and using
UIA user personal profile collected through the search history. It
Centralized Concept
LDB LCD Dictionary will not give any recommendations and warnings and does not
User like to recommend the information to the user. It will do simple
search.
2. Agent can interact with user and so it can get some
UIA User Interface Agent PEA Phrase Extraction Agent information while searching, but it will not suggest or
LDB Local Data Base recommend any information while searching, because the user
LCD Local Concept Dictionary is not patient enough to listen to the recommendations and
MDSSPA Mobile Domain Specific Self-Proclamative Agent
warnings.
Figure 1. Architecture of Domain Specific Multi-Agent Based Similarly the other fourteen choices are decided and
Retrieval/Recommendation System accordingly it decides the different types of users choice and
actions.
III. USER MODELING AND USER INTERFACE AGENT DESIGN
B. A Method for User Personal Profile Building
In the present system design we use the user-access matrix The main components of user profiles are User-Name,
to represent the users intention that consists of a set of phrases User-Id, User-Type, User-Subject Categories and User-Access
which expresses at least a partial intention. This is built in Matrix. Initially the User-Subject Categories are entered by the
adapting the user by means of different methods. The user user and later on it will be automatically updated by the system.
adaptation is done through the user profile and the user search The user-interested subjects hierarchies (User-Subject
Categories) are also learned by the system and the same is used
for the future searching and is recorded in the user profile. The
method of building the concept matrix will differ in different
circumstances. These methods are explained in the following
section.
1. In this first method of building the user-access matrix is
built using the user presented search strings. If the user presents
related terms that is also included in the matrix. The user access
matrix is also similar to the concept matrix, but we call it as the
concept matrix because it represents the user intension. There
will be only one user-access matrix used for relativity analysis.
2. In this second case, after presenting the search query its
category is also recorded in the history. If the new query is
related to that then those related phrases from that query is also
added and proceed to search. If search history is not available
then the global search profile is taken for the first time
searching.
3. The method of user type prediction is explained in the
subsection 3.1. This user profile normally represents the
various subject interests of the user and the type of the user.
The Global subject profile is used to explain the different type
of general subject concepts and their related items. Most of the
time the subject that the user refers is not very much clear. The
reason is that the subject matters cannot be simply expressed by
one or more keywords or phrases. In such a situation, the
system needs to track the user-interest through previous
history; otherwise it needs interaction with the user. But, many
times the user is not patient enough to interact with the system
to answer all the queries the agent asks for. This is attributed to
user understanding over a period of time. It basically
understands the type of the user and accordingly it takes
different types of recommendations or retrieval strategy [17].
That is the kind of assistance different users want about the
reactions to suggestions, actions, and about the reactions
towards interruptions, tolerance of agents errors, until the user
is patient enough to give either all related terms or not. That is
some may want to make basic assumptions on their own
through global profile or some times the user himself will
present the required terms and the related terms without user
profile. Some times the user profile string is needed to be
considered for the searching. After understanding various types
of users, types of retrieval mechanisms are employed for
recommendation and retrieval.
First the user query is entered into the interface system.
Then immediately the system will perform the concept
relativity analysis to identify the fourth-level sub-hierarchy
concept topic. On this process the phrases and words in the
user-query are first extracted and then it will be related to the
various keywords and phrases of all the fourth-level sub-
hierarchy categories using Latent Semantic Analysis (method
of performing the latent semantic analysis and concept relative
analysis is given in section 5). The most related concept
hierarchies are identified and then these areas are recorded as
the related areas to the user. In this case of our present design
the system always gives a chance to do a rational search. The
user interface provides a check box to indicate the rational
search and the user can indicate it through this option. That is
the system also does the search without looking into the user-
personal profiles if the user wants. Important critical part of the
interface design always keeps track of the interest of the user
and then issues the warning if it tries to access the ambiguities
terms or tries to travel in different or new direction by checking
the user adaptability. The adaptiveness of the user is
understood through different ways and is explained in the next
session. Normally the general subject hierarchy itself gives
sufficient information about the hierarchy and the relativity of
the system. It can be taken as the general global profile for the
whole system design.
IV. ACM CR CLASSIFICATION AND AUTOMATED CONCEPT-
MATRIX FORMULATION
The complete ACM CR classification tree hierarchy is
given in http://www.acm.org/class/1998/ccs98.html [1998
Version]. In this present work we wish to add more number of
concepts/phrases at every fourth level sub-hierarchy. Each and
every document is represented as a concept and every concept
is represented thorough a concept matrix. Concept matrix
contains a list of technical phrases. The system will
automatically add any number of concepts at this level. The
classification and extraction of technical phrases to construct a
concept matrix is the very critical task, for which we use the
list of ACM proper noun index, Keyword index. Apart from
this we also use a list of words and phrases from MicroSoft on-
line computer dictionary. Using these words and phrases, an
additional set of words and phrases is automatically extracted
by the phrase extractor agent. The occurrences of all these
phrases are taken and then the relativity between the list of
index and newly extracted phrase is taken into account in order
to include the particular technical phrase in the concept matrix.
These phrases are also stored in the concept dictionary and
used for the future usage. Normally while extracting the
technical phrases from the list of complete phrases extracted
from the query, we will just see the occurrence of these
independent words and phrases in those list and select those
phrases as the technical phrases.
V. METHOD FOR CONCEPT-PATTERN RELATIVITY
Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) is a theory and method for
representing the contextual usage of meaning of phrase
relativeness by statistical computations applied to a large
corpus of text. Phrase and passage meaning representation
derived by LSA have been found to be capable of simulating a
variety of human cognitive phenomena. After processing a
large sample of machine-readable language, LSA exhibits the
phrases, either taken from the original corpus or new, as points
in a very high dimensional semantic space.
In this case it is represented as a conceptual matrix and it
also permits one to infer about the relation of expected
contextual usage of phrases. LSA applies a Singular Value
Decomposition (SVD) to the matrix; this is a form of a factor
or more properly the mathematical generalization of which
factor analysis is a special case. In SVD, a rectangular matrix is
decomposed into the product of three other matrices. One
component matrix describes the original column entries in the
same way, and the third is a diagonal matrix containing scaling
values such that when the three components are matrix-
multiplied, the original matrix is reconstructed. The
reconstructed two-dimensional matrix that approximates the
original matrix and a few highest values are selected to
reconstruct the original matrix.
Each document in the particular sub-hierarchy is
represented by the rows and the columns represent each phrase
with respect to the document. Learning human like knowledge
consists in formulating a bivariate frequency table with row I
representing the ith phrase and column j representing the jth
document (or between any two entities) and fij the
corresponding frequency measured by the Shannons measure
of information p log p . This together with the dimension
reduction will constitute the constraint satisfaction for
prediction between the user-query and the expected values to
make recommendation/retrieval. Actual data pertaining to any
two measurable entities (phrases and sentences, text
classification in digital libraries), etc. will have to collect. Sets
of examples pertaining to each of the two entities can be
exhibited in a bivariate frequency table for determining the
relationships between any two examples. Tables can be
formulated for comparison and valid retrievals.
SVD is a powerful technique employed for solving a linear
system of equations AX=B, in M equations of N unknowns
with M > = < N in order to get unique set of solutions; a set of
singular solutions, infinite number of solutions; non trivial
solutions or trivial solutions based upon the nature of the
coefficient matrix A, whatever maybe the vectors X, B.
Concepts of rank, null space, range space of linear algebra are
essential in formulating the computer program for any practical
problem in conformity with the decomposition of the matrix A
[A] = [U ][W ][V T ]
in the usual notation when more equations than the
unknowns are given, relevant solutions can also be obtained by
least squares method.
After the reconstruction of the original matrix we find the
correlation between required user-concept matrix and the
existing document in the sub-hierarchy. If the correlation is
high then documents are retrieved and presented to the user.
The same process is repeated for all agents. If none of them
find good correlation in its sub-hierarchy it is proclaimed that
the information is not available in the hierarchy.
The main issue while using the LSA is the size of the
matrix very much high and the system is not able to process is
sometimes. In order to avoid this situation and keep the matrix
under control every time only a set of five to ten documents
alone are alternatively taken for relativity analysis.
VI. SIMULATION EXPRIMENTS AND RESULTS
The system is simulated using apache web servers. All
these servers are hosted with IBM Tehiti server to run the
Aglets [19]. The subject-specific agent, phrase-extraction agent
and user interfaces agent are developed using this aglets. There
are four such Apache web servers that are hosted and one of
them acts as a central server that runs the moderator, black-
board and central concept dictionary. An Agent Transfer
Protocol (ATP) is used to communicate with these different
agents. Aglet uses a technique called serialization to transmit
data on the heap and to migrate the interpretable byte-code.
These aglets are supporting message passing and broadcasting.
Each aglet is integrated with the functional components of this
architecture. The blackboard system is shown as the explicit
component and is implemented through using standard java
serialization. For the domain specific aglets (Agents) initially
the user has to specify the training sample document either
from the local machine or from the web through user-interface
aglet. Each domain specific aglets is designed to learn the
concept-matrix of that specific hierarchy. The training
documents are indicated with specific category-hierarchy and
this is considered as global subject profile. After the training is
over, the query is given to the system through user interface
screen and this is preprocessed and then the user access matrix
is framed as recorded and passed to blackboard. Then the
moderator broadcasts the message to all the domain-specific
aglets about the arrival of new query and every domain-specific
aglet gets the same and processes it to retrieve or recommend
set of documents related to the given user query. Normally
every user is logged in to the system through proper login. All
the user details are recorded and the user-profile is built as
explained in Section 3.
In these experiments, the ACM CR classification system at
the fourth-level hierarchy there exists nearly 1120 categories
and the present system is trained with few documents under
each category. To evaluate this approach all the servers are
hosted with sum of 6768 documents collected through Internet.
Then the retrieval/recommendation is measured with 86 queries
by different users. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of
retrieval/recommendation system is measured with the well
known precision measure used for different queries and is
shown by
Number of retrieved documents that are relevant
Precision =
Total number of document retrieved
Number of retrieved documents that are relevant
Recall =
Total number of relevant documents
Based on the measurement pertaining to precision and
recall the relevant documents are retrieved in this retrieval
system. It is found that the graph with recall taken in the
horizontal axis and precision in the vertical direction indicates
consistent with increasing of both the variables, justifying that
precision retrieval effectiveness.
To evaluate this approach some set of 30 different users are
chosen to evaluate the system and their satisfaction level are
presented in the figure 3. From this experiment it is established
that the retrieval accuracy is reasonably good also it is observed
that over a period of time the system is adaptive in nature.
 P r e c is io n V s R e c a ll
[2] Developing a Digital Library of Computer Science Teaching Resources,
100 Report of the ITiCSE98 Working Group On the Online Computer
80 Science Teaching Center, 1999 ACM 0163-5743199/0300.
60 [3] Information Management Resource Kit (iMARK), is an e-learning
Precision

40 intiative in agricultural information management developed by FAO and

20 contributing partner organizations. Digitization and Digital Libraries
0 Module, NCSI, IISc, Banglore.IMARKenquiries@fao.org.
0 20 40 60 80 100 [4] Using an Education Oriented Digital Libraries to organize and present
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100 [6] Fellner, Dieter W., Research Issues for Digital Libraries, Tu
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80 DlresIssues010313.pdf
% of Satisfaction

[7] Frew. J et. Al., The Alexandria Digital Library Architecture, Int. Jour.
60 Digital Libraries (2000) 2:259-268, Springer-Verlog 2000.
[8] Monica Bonett, Personalization of Web Services: Opportunities and
40 Challenges, Ariadne Issue 28,
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/personalization/intro.html
20
[9] R.Gururaj, P. Sreenivasa Kumar, Survey of User Profile Models for
Information Filtering System, CIT2004.
0
[10] Fang Liu, Clement Yu, Senior Member, Personalised Web Search for
1 4 7 10 13 16 19 22 25 28 Improving Retrieval Effectiveness,IEEE Trans. On Knowledge and Data
30 Different Users Engineering, Vol 16, No. 1, January 2004.
[11] Daniela Godoy, Analia Amandi.,Personal Searcher: An Intelligent Agent
for Searching Web Pages.
Figure 3. User satisfaction level for 30 different users.
[12] D.Cordero, P.Roldan, S.Schiafino, A.Amandi,Intelligent Agents
Generating Personal Newspapers.
VII. CONCLUSION [13] Silvia Schiaffino, Analia Amandi,Using Association Rules to Learn
Users Assistance Requirements, Proceddings ASAI 2003, Argentine
An attempt is made in this paper to design and develop an Symposium on Artificial Intelligence Buenos Aires, Argentina
adaptive multi-agent framework for research literature retrieval September 2003.
using ACM CR classification hierarchy. This work has [14] Michael Fleming and Robin Cohen, User Modeling in the Design of
revealed that the Latent Semantic Analysis along with concept Interactive Interface Agents.
matrix setup enables one to retrieve related concepts effectively [15] Daniela Godoy, Analia Amandi, A user Profiling Architecture for
Textual-Based Agents.
even though user given phrase is not available. The initial
[16] Marcelo Armentano, Daniela Godoy, Analia Amandi,An empirical study
system is setup with a few set of predefined words and phrases in agent based interface issues, Technical Report.
and later on it acquires all the set of phrases. It also yields good [17] Silvia Schiaffino, Analia Amandi, User-interface agent interaction:
results in terms of concept relativity. In this paper self- Personalization issues, Int. Jour. Human Computer Studies 60 (2004)
proclamation is identified as the new characteristics of the 129-148. www.elseviercomputerscience.com
multi-agent system and is established through these [18] ACM Computing Classification System, www.acm.org/class/1998
experiments. This characteristic of self-proclamation enables [19] www.trl.ibm.co.jp/aglets
the system to retrieve/ recommend documents quickly. The [20] Shahram Rahimi, Norman F. Carver, A Multi-Agent Architecture for
system is tested with ACM CR categories. The same may be Distributed Domain-specific Information Integration, Proc. Of the 38th
extended for other categories like DDC and other type of Hawaii Intl. Conference on System Sciences 2003, www.ieee.org
classification systems.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors would like to thank Prof. V.Rajaraman, SERC
for his able support and valuable guidance to this work. Also,
the first author (R.Ponnusamy) is supported by Tamilnadu
State Council for Science & Technology and has been
permitted to stay at National Center for Scientific Information
(NCSI) of Indian Institute of Science, Banglore under the
Young Scientist Fellowship program 2004-2005 to carry out
this work.

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