Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

mbinatorial explosion of inferences has always been one of the classic problems in AI. Resources are limited, and inferences potentially infinite; a reasoner needs to be able to determine which inferences are useful to draw from a given piece of text. But unless one considers the goals of the reasoner, it is very difficult to give a principled definition of what it means for an inference to be "useful." This paper presents a theory of inference control based on the notion of interestingness. W e introduce knowledge goals, the goals of a reasoner to acquire some piece of knowledge required for a reasoning task, as the focussing criteria for inference control. W e argue that knowledge goals correspond to the interests of the reasoner, and present a theory of interestingness that is functionally motivated by consideration of the needs of the reasoner. Although we use story understanding as the reasoning task, many of the arguments carry over to other cognitive tasks as well.