A General Purpose Inference Engine for Evidential Reasoning Research

The purpose of this paper is to report on the most recent developments in our ongoing investigation of th.e representation and manipulation of uncertainty in automated reasoning systems. In our earlier studies (Tong and Shapiro, 1985) we described a series of experiments with Rt;BRIC (Tong e t al., 198.'5), a. system for full-text document retrieval, that generated some interesting insights into the effects of choosing among a. class of scalar valued uncertainty calculi. In order to extend these results we have begun a. new series of experiments with a larger class of representations and calculi, and to help perform these experiments we have developed a. genera.! purpose inference engine.