Newshound Revisited: The Intelligent Agent that Retrieves News Postings

Abstract

There has been a lot of research done in the area of Intelligent Internet Agents. In this chapter, we would like to report our experience in implementing such an agent. It is called Newshound, and it can be trained to recognize a desired topic, and then scan Usenet newsgroups looking for new examples of that topic. Recently, Newshound has been in use by law enforcement personnel, and in response to their feedback, we have extended its capabilities. Also, we introduce two additional intelligent agents: Chathound and Webhound. Finally, we describe the inter-agent communication layer, the facilitator for cooperation between ANSER’s intelligent agents