Multi‐agent information classification using dynamic acquaintance lists

Abstract There has been considerable interest in recent years in providing automated information services, such as information classification, by means of a society of collaborative agents. These agents augment each other's knowledge structures (e.g., the vocabularies) and assist each other in providing efficient information services to a human user. However, when the number of agents present in the society increases, exhaustive communication and collaboration among agents result in a large communication overhead and increased delays in response time. This paper introduces a method to achieve selective interaction with a relatively small number of potentially useful agents, based on simple agent modeling and acquaintance lists. The key idea presented here is that the acquaintance list of an agent, representing a small number of other agents to be collaborated with, is dynamically adjusted. The best acquaintances are automatically discovered using a learning algorithm, based on the past history of collaboration. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate that such dynamically learned acquaintance lists can lead to high quality of classification, while significantly reducing the delay in response time.