Learning to Assign Degrees of Belief in Relational Domains

As uncertainty pervades the real world, it seems obvious that the decisions we make, the conclusions we reach, and the explanations we offer are usually based on our judgements of the probability of uncertain events such as success in a new medical treatment or the state of the market. For example, if an agent wishes to employ the expected-utility paradigm of decision theory in order to guide its actions, it must assign subjective probabilities to various assertions. Less obvious, however, is the question of how to elicit such degrees of beliefs.