An agent for Web information dissemination based on a genetic algorithm

We present and evaluate the architecture of a personal agent that mines Web information sources and retrieves documents according to user´s interests. The agent represents and retrieves documents using classical information retrieval techniques and uses user´s feedback and genetic algorithms to learn and adapt to changes in user´s interests. The agent was customized to help professionals that need to be up to date with the Brazilian Tax Legislation, stored at the Brazilian Federal Revenue site. Experiments discussed on the paper shown that the agent has good precision and recall rates when retrieving documents, and are also able to successfully detect changes in user´s interests.