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Experiment

The system is set up with a single agent which retrieves news articles pertaining to former Yugoslavia. The profile population size is five. One of the international newsgroups is randomly added to the newsgroup field of each of the initial profiles. A single keyword, ``bosnia'', is added to the keyword field of each profile, so as to provide a reasonable starting point for the system. Every 3 sessions, a new generation of the population is created.

The performance measures used are precision and recall. Recall is calculated by manually identifying the documents that are relevant. Documents pertaining to former Yugoslavia in any of the newsgroups are classified as relevant. The scope of this experiment is restricted to the newsgroups which carry newswire stories. An arbitrary threshold () for document scores is set. Only documents scoring above the the threshold are retrieved for presentation. To achieve the desired goal of high recall and high precision the similarity scores of relevant documents must lie above the threshold and the scores of irrelevant documents must lie below the threshold.


MIT Media Lab - Autonomous Agents Group - agentmaster@media.mit.edu