1. A Shopping Agent for the WWW
Information Society 2002 Ljubljana, Slovenija
A Shopping Agent for the WWW
Aleksander Pivk Department of Intelligent Systems Jozef Stefan Institute Ljubljana, Slovenia
16th October 2002

2. What is an (intelligent) agent?
An intelligent agent is a computer system capable of flexible, autonomous action in some environment.
Examples:
Environment: internet agent, OS agent, desktop agent, www agent, etc.
Task: information agent, shopping agent, interface agent, agent, notification agent, etc.
PICTURE:
an ongoing process, where a system takes data as an input from the env, transforms the data (performs actions) and returns the output to the environment. The process is a never-ending loop where the agent exploits the benefits of the environment dynamics.
PROPERTIES:
autonomy: capability of independent acting, and exhibiting control over its internal state;
reactiveness: maintains an ongoing interaction with its env., and responds to changes that occur in it (in time for the response to be useful);
pro-activeness: ability to generate and achieve goals, and to take the initiative, when recognizes an opportunity;
social ability: ability to interact with other agents (and/or humans) via some kind of agent-communication language, and perhaps cooperate with others;
intelligence: ability to acquire knowledge through learning

3. Information agents Task: Types:
access/integrate information from a variety of data sources
Types:
Information Retrieval Agents
search engines
Information Filtering Agents
mail agents, news-delivery agents
Information Extraction Agents
wrappers
Information Integration Agents
meta-search engine, comparison-shopping

4. Information Extraction
IE is the task of identifying the specific fragments of a single document that constitute its core semantic content. Examples:
a) from weather report  identify locations, dates, temperatures (high and low);
b) from online stores  get product names, their images, and prices.
Constitute – doloca,predstavlja
NAME Casablanca Restaurant
STREET 220 Lincoln Boulevard
CITY Venice
PHONE (310)

5. Wrappers A wrapper is … Why using wrappers?
a procedure or a rule that explains how to extract information from an information source
tailored to a particular document collection
appropriate to semi-structured information source
Why using wrappers?
heterogeneous information sources
different styles of user interface and
different formats of output display
As the quantity and diversity of the information available online increases, more of the common information access tasks are done by program such as web wrappers. Wrappers faciliate access to Web-based information sources by providing a uniform querying and data extraction capability. For example, a Web wrapper for the yellow pages source can take a query for a Mexican restaurant near Marina del Rey, CA, and extract the restaurant’s name, its address and the phone number, in the same way as the information is extracted from a database.

6. Implemented System ShinA – (SHoppINg Assistant)
Customized Comparison Shopping Agent
simple heuristic-based approach
little domain-knowledge used

7. ShinA – Shopping Assistant

8. Our focus Wrapper learning in real time Little use of domain knowledge
to realize customized comparison shopper
Little use of domain knowledge
rather use simple heuristics
exploit the characteristics of semi-structured documents
Flexible and Practical
handle both table-type and list-type displays
handle noisy product description (missing attributes)
handle single product description in multiple lines

9. Learning Query Scheme Templates
<form site= "amazon.com">
<name>searchform</name>
<method>post</method>
<action>
<input type= "text" name="field-keywords" size=“15" />
<input type= "image" name= "Go"/>
<select name= "index">
<option value= “all products" selected />
<option value= "books" /><option value= "…" />
</select>
</form>

10. Learning product descriptions
Table-type display of
5 different PDU’s
Task
recognize each PDU
recognize attributes within PDU
learn rules to extract attributes
PDU - Product Description Unit

11. PDU Pattern Learning: Algorithm
First phase
ignore irrelevant parts of HTML source (header, advertisements, footer)
the remaining HTML source is broken into logical lines
Second phase
categorize each logical line
9 different categories (PRICE, TITLE, IMAGE, URL_LINK, TTAG, LBTAG, etc.)
Third phase
find most frequent pattern(s) for PDU(s) in the sequence of logical line categories

12. PDU Pattern Learning: Example
A fragment of the HTML source of the search result for the query “intelligent agent“ to Amazon bookstore.
<img src=" width="80“ height="80" vspace="2" alt="">
</td>
<td>
<p>
<a href=" --3
Intelligent Internet Agents: Agent-Based Information Discovery on the Internet --1
</a>
<br> $
{ 0:price; 1:title; 2:image; 3:link; 4:table tag; 5:line tag, 9:other tag; }
Extracted PDU pattern:

13. Simple Heuristics Recognizing a title Recognizing a price
contains at least one query word
text line that corresponds to pre-determined pattern’s title
Recognizing a price
contains a currency symbol ($, €)
contains a currency token (EUR, SIT)
contains digit(s) with relevant delimiters (‘,’; ‘.’)
Recognizing an image
unique image url-address within pattern
Able to recognize attributes with heuristic rules
examples: ISBN numbers, dates, discount rates
Unable to recognize other attributes
authors, review comments, recommendation status

14. Conclusion Limitations Future work query search box must exist
price information must exist
extracts only a few attributes (title,price,image,link,…)
Future work
more use of domain knowledge (ontologies)
extract other non-price attributes
use of XML-based wrappers
applications to other domains