"The Problem of Asking the Minimum Number of Questions
in Horn Clause Systems"
Mathematical and Computer Modeling,
1994, Vol. 20, No. 9, pp. 75-87.
Evangelos Triantaphyllou and Jinchang Wang
Abstract:
This paper deals with the issue of question asking strategies in
expert systems with Horn clause rule bases. A good strategy would
ask as few questions as possible to reach a conclusion. This paper
describes the development of an efficient and effective heuristic
approach which is an extension of the strategy developed by Wang
and Vande Vate [16]. Similar to the original strategy, the
proposed approach is also organized into two phases. In the first
phase a set of candidate questions is formed as in the original
strategy. In the second phase a question is selected from the
previous set. A new question selection rule is used in the
proposed strategy. This rule is optimal, given set of candidate
questions. Furthermore, computational results indicate that the new
question asking strategy is a highly effective and efficient
practical approach.
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