Usefulness of Information for Goal Achievement

Abstract

This paper focuses on modelling information usefulness. More precisely, it aims at characterizing how useful a piece of information is for a cognitive agent which has some beliefs and goals. The paper presents three different approaches. We take Information Retrieval as a particular application domain and we compare some existing measures with the usefulness measure introduced in the paper.Célia da Costa Pereira acknowledges support of the PEPS AIRINFO project funded by the CNRS. This work has been carried out during her visit at the ONERA center of Toulouse.

Usefulness of Information for Achieving Goals with Disjunctive Premises

“…Here, we propose a solution to relax this hypothesis by assuming that a goal can be achieved in different ways. We extend the three definitions of usefulness, that is the binary approach, the ordinal approach and the numerical approach, proposed in Cholvy and da Costa Pereira (2019), and prove that the new proposed definitions are indeed a generalization of the definitions proposed therein.…”

“…To the best of our knowledge, apart from the work we are extending here (Cholvy & da Costa Pereira, 2019), there is no approach in any of the above-mentioned fields that proposes a framework that represents an IR system as a cognitive agent endowed with an explicit representation of the user as an information-seeking cognitive agent looking for information to fill a gap in its knowledge. for explicitly representing an information-seeking user as a cognitive agent seeking information to fill a gap in its knowledge.…”

“…We propose indeed an improvement of the representation of the user as a cognitive agent endowed with the capacity of measuring the usefulness of a piece of information to help it fill the knowledge gap between its current knowledge state and the desired knowledge state. We extend the three definitions of information usefulness we proposed in Cholvy and da Costa Pereira (2019). A particular added value of our proposal is that the numerical based measure presented in Section 6 allows to capture in a single value different dimensions which have an impact in the relevance measure of a document, without the need for eliciting an explicit priority order on those dimensions, unlike in da Costa Pereira et al (2012).…”

A Survey of Adaptive Multi-Agent Networks and Their Applications in Smart Cities

“…The packet dropout rate in the network is usually variable and stochastic due to fluctuations in the power supply and the traffic of the system, and they are usually modeled by the Bernoulli process [109]. Information dynamics are also designed based on missing information rates during communications and the usefulness of the collected information for their decision-making process [110]. Noises in agents' statuses and measurements are another challenge influencing the quality of the information flow in multi-agent networks [111].…”

A Cognitive Agent Framework in Information Retrieval: Using User Beliefs to Customize Results

“…More recently, Cholvy et al [6] proposed 3 definitions for measuring the usefulness of information for a cognitive agent. The definitions are based on the fact that a user requesting information needs it to achieve a goal.…”