{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"On The Storage Economy Of Error-Tolerating Question-Answering Systems","authors":[{"name":"Judea Pearl","slug":"judea-pearl","given":"Judea","family":"Pearl","affiliation":""}],"abstract":"The possibility of saving various computational resources is an argument often advanced in favor of permitting question-answering systems to make occasional errors. In this paper we establish absolute bounds on the amount of memory savings that is achievable with a specified error level forcertain types of question-answering systems. Question-answering systems are treated as communication channels carrying information concerning the acceptable answers to an admissible set of queries. Shannon's rate-distortion theory is used to calculate bounds on the memory required for several question-answering tasks. For data retrieval, pattern-classification, and position-matching systems it was found that only small memory gains could be materialized from error-tolerance. In pair-ordering tasks on the other hand, more significant memory savings could be accomplished if small errorrates are tolerated. Similar limitations govern the tradeoffs between error and computation time.","doi":null,"url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1975/88","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1975/0088.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1975/88.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1975/bibtex/88","volume":{"slug":"1975","title":"Proceedings of the Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 1975","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1975/","year":1975,"location":"Tbilisi, Georgia, USSR","dates":"","editors":"Patrick Winston and Carl Hewitt","isbn":"","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence","doi_prefix":""},"section":"A.I. Software","track":"A.I. Software","number":88,"pages":{"first":562,"last":567},"keywords":[],"videos":[],"references":[],"license_note":"Copyright International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence."}