Abstract: A system for retrieving multimedia information is provided using a computer coupled to a computer-based network, such as the Internet, and particularly the World Wide Web (WWW). The system includes a web browser, a graphic user interface enabled through the web browser to allow a user to input a query representing the information the user wishes to retrieve, and an agent server for producing, training, and evolving first agents and second agents. Each of the first agents retrieves documents (Web page) from the network at a different first network address and at other addresses linked from the document at the first network address. Each of the second agents executes a search on different search engines on the network in accordance with the query to retrieve documents at network addresses provided by the search engine. The system includes a natural language processor which determines the subject categories and important terms of the query, and of the text of each agent retrieved document.

Abstract: A natural language processing system uses unformatted naturally occurring text and generates a subject vector representation of the text, which may be an entire document or a part thereof such as its title, a paragraph, clause, or a sentence therein. The subject codes which are used are obtained from a lexical database and the subject code(s) for each word in the text is looked up and assigned from the database. The database may be a dictionary or other word resource which has a semantic classification scheme as designators of subject domains. Various meanings or senses of a word may have assigned thereto multiple, different subject codes and psycholinguistically justified sense meaning disambiguation is used to select the most appropriate subject field code. Preferably, an ordered set of sentence level heuristics is used which is based on the statistical probability or likelihood of one of the plurality of codes being the most appropriate one of the plurality.