Learning Abstraction Hierarchies for Problem Solving

The use of abstraction in problem solving is an effective approach to reducing search, but finding good abstractions is a difficult problem, even for people. This paper identifies a criterion for selecting useful abstractions, describes a tractable algorithm for generating them, and empirically demonstrates that the abstractions reduce search. The abstraction learner, called ALPINE, is integrated with the PRODIGY problem solver [Minton et al., 1989b, Carbonell et al., 1990] and has been tested on large problem sets in multiple domains.

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