Thursday, May 22, 2008

Reasoning and Inferencing

Whenever I read about a journal or article on Artificial Intelligence, it sound like a science fiction to me. Okay okay I may not be up-to-date on my knowledge about what is happening in AI field. But more often than not what I find is most of the scenarios described in those fiction (?) are related to inference.

I read somewhere long back that Inference is the act of attaining a conclusion based on certain facts already present in the system. What are facts? In my opinion it is do to with the statements presented before us. But does the computers understand the statements as we do? I guess not. Then in relation to computer system the facts are the object, and their attributes. So we have few objects and their state information (as attributes) and we need to deduce a conclusion from that. How do we do that?

In order to combine these facts the system needs to have certain ability (A set of rules which will let us combine these facts together and infer something). This ability could not be anything else but Reasoning. By Reasoning we mean semantic relationship here. As we discussed in earlier posts that we need to have proper annotation in order to do Semantic Search and establish semantic relationship among entities in the system.

I guess I am getting more and more philosophical on this topic. I remember in our childhood we used to have a phrase. More Study More confusion, Less study less confusion, No Study NO Confusion :).

I would love to hear from readers about their opinion on relationship between Inference and Reasoning.

Until Next Time... :)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

It might help to think back to logic, where one wants to have a proof theory (the syntax and inference machinery) and a model theory (the semantics of the domain being reasoned about) which are in as close an agreement with one another as possible.

Samir Kumar Mishra said...

Agree with you Simon but then again we are faced with the question as how do we separate facts about the object from the object itself. Also it brings a disparate need for standards in object representation.

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