A knowledge discovery apparatus and method that extracts both specifically desired as well as pertinent and relevant information to query from a corpus of multiple elements that can be structured, unstructured, and/or semi-structured, along with imagery, video, speech, and other forms of data representation, to generate a set of outputs with a confidence metric-applied to the match of the output against the query. The invented apparatus includes a multi-level architecture, along with one or more feedback loop(s) from any Level N to any lower Level so that a user can control the output of this knowledge discovery method via providing inputs to the utility function.