Value estimation based computer-assisted data mining for surfing the Internet

Gathering of novel information from the WWW constitutes a real challenge for artificial intelligence (AI) methods. Large search engines do not offer a satisfactory solution, their indexing cycle is long and they may offer a huge amount of documents. An AI-based link-highlighting procedure designed to assist surfing is studied here. It makes use of (i) 'experts', i.e. pretrained classifiers, forming the long-term memory of the system, (ii) relative values of experts and value estimation of documents based on recent choices of the users. Value estimation adapts fast and forms the short-term memory of the system. All experiments show that surfing based filtering can efficiently highlight 10-20% of the documents in about 5 steps, or less.