An Adaptive Social Network for Information Access: Theoretical and Experimental Results

We consider a social network of software agents who assist each other in helping their users find information. Unlike in most previous approaches, our architecture is fully distributed and includes agents who preserve the privacy and autonomy of their users. These agents learn models of each other in terms of expertise (ability to produce correct domain answers) and sociability (ability to produce accurate referrals). We study our framework experimentally to study how the social network evolves. Specifically, we find that under our multiagent learning heuristic, the quality of the network improves with interactions; the quality is maximized when both expertise and sociability are considered; pivot agents further improve the quality of the network and have a catalytic effect on its quality even if they are ultimately removed. Moreover, the quality of the network improves when clustering decreases, reflecting the intuition that you need to talk to people outside your close circle to get the best information. ∗This research was supported by Ericsson and by the National Science Foundation under grant IIS-9624425 (Career Award) and ITR-0081742. †Address correspondence to Bin Yu, Department of Computer Science, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-7535, USA. E-mail: [email protected].