Hierarchically organized neural net agents for distributed Web information retrieval

Agent based information retrieval systems have gained great attention, due to the proliferation of readily available but overwhelming information on the Web. We present a neural network based multi agent, especially hierarchically organized information retrieval system. The motivation is based on our experience with an experimental system called Hierarchically Organized Multi-agent Information Retrieval System (HOMIRS) and an analysis of the tradeoff between multi-agent coordination overhead and the benefits of the hierarchical organization of agents. We first introduce our neural network based information retrieval system and then present experimental results with HOMIRS.