THE PROBLEM OF ASKING THE MINIMUM NUMBER OF QUESTIONS IN HORN CLAUSE SYSTEMS

This paper deals with the issue of question asking strategies in exper t systems with Kern clause rule bases. A good strategy would ask as fe w questions as possible to reach a conclusion. This paper describes th e development of an efficient and effective heuristic approach which i s an extension of the strategy developed by Wang and Vande Vate [1]. S imilar to the original strategy, the proposed approach is also organiz ed into two phases. In the first phase, a set of candidate questions i s formed as in the original strategy. In the second phase, a question is selected from the previous set. A new question selection rule is us ed in the proposed strategy. This rule is optimal, given a set of cand idate questions. Furthermore, computational results indicate that the new question asking strategy is a highly effective and efficient pract ical approach.