An architecture is described for designing systems that acquire and manipulate large amounts of unsystematized, or so-called commonsense, knowledge. Its aim is to exploit to the full those aspects of computational learning that are known to offer powerful solutions in the acquisition and maintenance of robust knowledge bases. The architecture makes explicit the requirements on the basic computational tasks that are to be performed and is designed to make these computationally tractable even for very large databases. The main claims are that (i) the basic learning tasks are tractable and (ii) tractable learning offers viable approaches to a range of issues that have been previously identified as problematic for artificial intelligence systems that are entirely programmed. In particular, attribute efficiency holds a central place in the definition of the learning tasks, as does also the capability to handle relational information efficiently. Among the issues that learning offers to resolve are robustness to inconsistencies, robustness to incomplete information and resolving among alternatives.Engineering and Applied Science
