Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Inference can be viewed as a search through a space of inference rules. Backward and forward inference differ in the direction of the search: backward inference searches from goals to ground assertions; forward inference searches from ground assertions to goals. This paper describes an inference procedure, called bi-directional inference, which limits the number of inference rules searched. Bi-directional inference results from the interaction between forward and backward inference and loosely corresponds to bi-directional search. We show through an example that, when used throughout a session of related tasks, bi-directional inference sets up a conversational context and prunes the search through the space of inference rules by ignoring rules which are not relevant to that context.