Combinatorial explosion of inferences has always been a central problem in artificial intelligence. Although the inferences that can be drawn from a reasoner's knowledge and from available inputs is very large (potentially infinite), the inferential resources available to any reasoning system are limited. With limited inferential capacity and very many potential inferences, reasoners must somehow control the process of inference. Not all inferences are equally useful to a given reasoning system. Any reasoning system that has goals (or any form of a utility function) and acts based on its beliefs indirectly assigns utility to its beliefs. Given limits on the process of inference, and variation in the utility of inferences, it is clear that a reasoner ought to draw the inferences that will be most valuable to it. This paper presents an approach to this problem that makes the utility of a (potential) belief an explicit part of the inference process. The method is to generate exp...

this paper, we describe a framework for goal-driven learning and its relationship to prior and current theories from each of these perspectives.

Intelligent information retrieval (IIR) requires inference. The number of inferences that can be drawn by even a simple reasoner is very large, and the inferential resources available to any practical computer system are limited. This problem is one long faced by AI researchers. In this paper, we present a method used by two recent machine learning programs for control of inference that is relevant to the design of IIR systems. The key feature of the approach is the use of explicit representations of desired knowledge, which we call knowledge goals. Our theory addresses the representation of knowledge goals, methods for generating and transforming these goals, and heuristics for selecting among potential inferences in order to feasibly satisfy such goals. In this view, IIR becomes a kind of planning: decisions about what to infer, how to infer and when to infer are based on representations of desired knowledge, as well as internal representations of the system's inferential abilities ...