Thesis (Ph.D.)--Aberdeen University, 2008. / Title from web page (viewed on July 23, 2009). Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis is motivated by the need for autonomous agents on the Semantic Web to be able to learn The Semantic Web is an effort for extending the existing Web with machine understandable information, thus enabling intelligent agents to understand the content of web-pages and help users carrying out tasks online. For such autonomous personal agents working on a world wide Semantic Web we make two observations. Firstly, every user is different and the Semantic Web will never cater for them all - - therefore, it is crucial for an agent to be able to learn from the user and the world around it to provide a personalised view of the web. Secondly, due to the immense amounts of information available on the world wide Semantic Web an agent cannot read and process all available data. We argue that to deal with the information overload a goal-directed approach is needed; an agent must be able to reason about the external world, the internal state and the actions available and only carry out the actions that help activate the current goal. In the first part of this thesis we explore the application of two machine learning techniques to Semantic Web data. Firstly, we investigate the classification of Semantic Web resources, we discuss the issues of mapping Semantic Web format to an input representation suitable for a selection of well-known algorithms, and outline the requirements for these algorithms to work well in a Semantic Web context. Secondly, we consider the clustering of Semantic Web resources. Here we focus on the definition of the similarity between two resources, and how we can determine what part of a large Semantic Web graph is relevant to a single resource. In the second part of the thesis we describe our goal-directed learning agent Smeagol. We present explicit definitions of the classification and clustering techniques devised in the first part of the thesis, allowing Smeagol to use a planning approach to create plans of actions that may fulfil a given top-level goal. We also investigate different ways that Smeagol can dynamically replan when steps within the initial plan fail and show that Smeagol can offer plausible learned answers to a given query, even when no explicit correct answer exists.

Four relatively separate topics are presented in the thesis. Each topic represents one particular aspect of the Information Extraction discipline. The first two topics are focused on our information extraction methods based on deep language parsing. The first topic relates to how deep language parsing was used in our extraction method in combination with manually designed extraction rules. The second topic deals with a method for automated induction of extraction rules using Inductive Logic Programming. The third topic of the thesis combines information extraction with rule based reasoning. The core of our extraction method was experimentally reimplemented using semantic web technologies, which allows saving the extraction rules in so called shareable extraction ontologies that are not dependent on the original extraction tool. The last topic of the thesis deals with document classification and fuzzy logic. We are investigating the possibility of using information obtained by information extraction techniques to document classification. Our implementation of so called Fuzzy ILP Classifier was experimentally used for the purpose of document classification.