{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"Measuring and Improving the Effectiveness of Representations","authors":[{"name":"Russell Greiner","slug":"russell-greiner","given":"Russell","family":"Greiner","affiliation":""},{"name":"Charles Elkan","slug":"charles-elkan","given":"Charles","family":"Elkan","affiliation":""}],"abstract":"This report discusses what it means to claim that a representation is an effective encoding of knowledge. We first present dimensions of merit for evaluating representations, based on the view that usefulness is a behavioral property, and is necessarily relative to a specified task. We then provide methods (based on results from mathematical statistics) for reliably measuring effectiveness empirically, and hence for comparing different representations. We also discuss weak but guaranteed methods of improving inadequate representations. Our results are an application of the ideas of formal learning theory to concrete knowledge representation formalisms.","doi":null,"url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1991/78","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1991/0078.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1991/78.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1991/bibtex/78","volume":{"slug":"1991","title":"Proceedings of the Twelfth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 1991","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1991/","year":1991,"location":"Sydney, New South Wales, Australia","dates":"24-30 August 1991","editors":"John Mylopoulos and Ray Reiter","isbn":"","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence","doi_prefix":""},"section":"Knowledge Representation","track":"Knowledge Representation","number":78,"pages":{"first":518,"last":523},"keywords":[],"videos":[],"references":[],"license_note":"Copyright International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence."}