Traversing News with Ant Colony Optimisation and Negative Pheromones
This addresses the challenge of clustering and organizing online news for consumers and producers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing swarm intelligence techniques with a specific adaptation.
The authors tackled the problem of organizing online news documents by developing a novel bio-inspired approach using Ant Colony Optimization with negative pheromones to find Hamiltonian cycles over documents from The Guardian, resulting in a method that marks unrewarding paths with a 'no-entry' signal.
The past decade has seen the rapid development of the online newsroom. News published online are the main outlet of news surpassing traditional printed newspapers. This poses challenges to the production and to the consumption of those news. With those many sources of information available it is important to find ways to cluster and organise the documents if one wants to understand this new system. A novel bio inspired approach to the problem of traversing the news is presented. It finds Hamiltonian cycles over documents published by the newspaper The Guardian. A Second Order Swarm Intelligence algorithm based on Ant Colony Optimisation was developed that uses a negative pheromone to mark unrewarding paths with a "no-entry" signal. This approach follows recent findings of negative pheromone usage in real ants.