Learning as Goal-Driven Inference
Ryszard S. Michalski, Ashwin Ram · The MIT Press eBooks · 1995
goals during the performance of a reasoning task, the prioritization of learning goals, and the pursuit of learning goals using multiple learning strategies (Hunter, 1990; Ram, 1989, 1991; Ram & Cox, 1994; Ram & Hunter, 1992). However, while previous efforts have focused on the process of generating learning goals (Cox & Ram, 1994; Ram, 1991; Ram & Cox, 1994) and on the planful pursuit of learning goals (Cox & Ram, 1994; Hunter, 1990; Ram & Hunter, 1992; Redmond, 1992), little attention has been paid to the fundamental learning actions that actually carry out the inferences necessary to learn. In order to develop a general theory of learning, it is important to understand the "primitives" of learning, that is, to develop a principled theory of the learning actions involved in acquiring and transforming knowledge. The second key idea, then, is to model learning as a kind of inference in which the system augments and reformulates its knowledge using various types of primitive