Unifying Data-Directed and Goal-Directed Control: An Example and Experiments

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2

Problem Solving and Search

Effective control in a multi-level cooperating knowledge source problem solver (such as Hearsay-II) requires the system to reason about the relationships among competing and cooperating knowledge source (KS) instantiations (both past and potential) that are working on different aspects and levels of the problem. Such reasoning is needed to assess the current state of problem solving and to develop plans for using the system’s limited processing resources to the best advantage. The relationships among KS instantations can be naturally represented when KS activity is viewed simultaneously from a data-directed and a goal-directed perspective. In this paper we show how data- and goal-directed control can be integrated into a single, uniform framework, and we present an example and experimental results of sophisticated focusing using this framework.