Memory and Web Mining

They are two additional groups of nano-agents for implementing memory and web mining

functionalities. The memory group is responsible for storing and retrieving information

when needed. It stores all interactions with the user in “log files” and an indexer

periodically parses these files and extracts keywords. A dedicated plugin package adds to

nanoScheme a small set of functions for retrieving information in this memory. When the

character has no information on a specific question, the web mining group tries to find a

pertinent answer by searching information on the web (Millet & Heudin, 2007). The mining

process is the following:

 Seek: (a) extract keywords from the user input sentence and (b) launch a query on

one or more web search engines; (c) for each result page, URLs are extracted, (d)

badly formatted URLs or those that cannot be accessed are removed.

 Analyze: (a) each resulting URL is accessed and downloaded; (b) each file is then

cleaned and tags are removed; (c) the resulting text is formatted in regular

sentences; (d) we remove any strange sentences, all those that do not contain any

of the keywords, those two small or two large, and question sentences.

 Select: (a) each URL file is scored, taking into account the number of cooccurrences

of the keywords; (b) URLs are sorted according to their score; (c) and

the highest one is selected.

 Format: (a) all sentences in the selected URL file are scored according to the

keywords and the structure of the phrase; (b) the highest scored sentence is

formatted and used as the output.

8 Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agents

Graphical Interface

The prototype included also three agents for implementing the graphical interface. They

controlled the following tasks: (1) get the user entries and diffuse them to the local nanoagents,

(2) display the resulting answer in the appropriate window area; (3) receive the

character animation commands and apply them. In the experiments, the character animation

is based on a reduced set of pre-computed 3D clips, each one corresponding to a given

situation: “hello”, “bye”, “waiting”, “speaking”, “surprised” and one for each main mood

(cf. section 4.3).

Fig. 3. The graphical interface showing the self-animated 3D character.

Results