Applying association rules to information navigation

In this paper, an information navigation agent is proposed as a new interface for obtaining Web information in a mobile environment. A central task of information retrieval systems developed up to now has been to narrow down a great deal of information by displaying search results to a user, followed by refinement of queries on the basis of these results. These have been methods suitable for use in a desktop environment. In contrast, the authors' agent can navigate toward incrementally better information by generating approximating solutions based on constraints on the attributes of the search object and obtaining further information by dialogue with the user. A scheme in which the agent resolves search conditions by using association rules between keywords and adds new search conditions has been proposed. In addition, since a navigation failure occurs if the association rules are used inappropriately, refining the association rules by using statistical tests and graphic analyses has been proposed and its effectiveness has been verified.