Wen-Lian Hsu, Yi-Shiou Chen and Yuan-Kai Wang

調閱原文請洽圖書室

As the Internet is flooded with different types of documents (unstructured, semi-structured texts) and heterogeneous databases, information retrieval and extraction become increasingly difficult. We propose to deal with the information service problem on the Internet by creating an agent society in which agents act as spokesperson for various web pages, databases and provide information integration services in a cooperative manner. Furthermore, these agents can communicate with restricted natural language. The natural language used by these agents is sufficiently constrained so as to avoid ambiguity as much as possible while retaining its richness and flexibility. We use KQML as the communication protocol. The restricted natural language sentences are placed in the content parameter. These agents are particularly useful in information retrieval, extraction and integration services where interfaces in natural language are appropriate. The basic framework for our agent society is a context sensitive model for concept understanding. Such a model allows us to set up a natural language protocol so that each agent can advertise what it is capable of as well as "understand" and utilize those services other agents can provide. There are two important features of such an agent society: (1) heterogeneous databases can be naturally integrated; (2) human-computer interface will be friendlier since retrieval and extraction based on natural language descriptions (rather than keywords) can be handled more smoothly. Several prototype agent systems are being constructed based on the architecture proposed in this paper. Preliminary experiments show that this approach is very promising.

 

Keywords: agent communication language, agent architecture, multi-agents, natural language agents