Abstract:
In negotiation, information acquisition and validation play an important role in the decision making process.
In this paper we briefly present the framework of a smart data mining system for providing contextual information
from the Internet to a negotiation agent. We then present one of its components in more details - an effective
automated technique for extracting relevant articles from news web sites, so that they can be used further by the
mining agents. Most current techniques experience difficulties to cope with changes in websites structure and formats.
The proposed extracting process is completely automatic and independent of web site formats. The technique
is based on identifying regularities in both format and content of the news web sites. The algorithms are applicable
to both single- and multi-document web sites. Since invalid URLs can cause errors in data extraction, we also present
a method for the negotiation agent to estimate the validity of the extracted data based on the frequency of the
relevant words in the news title. This paper also presents a new procedure for constructing news data sets of given
topics. The extracted news data set is further utilised by the parties involved in negotiation. The information retrieved
from the data set can support both human and automated negotiators.
