Textual case-based reasoning

The Knowledge Engineering Review, 20(3): pp. 255-260.This commentary provides a definition of textual case-based reasoning (TCBR) and surveys research contributions according to four research questions. We also describe how TCBR can be distinguished from text mining and information retrieval. We conclude with potential directions for TCBR research

An Integrated Textual Case-Based System

Textual Case-Based Reasoning as a problem solving approach allows knowledge source to be integrated with a view to improving the effectiveness of the system during retrieval. The earlier proposed Textual Case-based System depends on statistical similarity alone and most of the time does not retrieve the solution to the problem even if it exists. In this paper, the WordNet is being integrated to the developed Textual  Case-Based Mobile Phone Diagnosis Support system in order to take the synonyms similarity of the problem terms into account while diagnosing a given problem. Thus, the integration will makes the system not to depend on statistical similarity alone but rather take synonyms similarity of the problem term into consideration. The result of the experimental evaluationusing some set of problems has demonstrated that retrieval by incorporating WordNet works better since it diagnosed 95% of the problems with relevant solutions than the retrieval without WordNet which diagnosed 75% of the problems with relevant solutions.Keywords: Textual Case-Based Reasoning, jColibri, WordNe

Case reuse in textual case-based reasoning.

Text reuse involves reasoning with textual solutions of previous problems to solve new similar problems. It is an integral part of textual case-based reasoning (TCBR), which applies the CBR problem-solving methodology to situations where experiences are predominantly captured in text form. Here, we explore two key research questions in the context of textual reuse: firstly what parts of a solution are reusable given a problem and secondly how might these relevant parts be reused to generate a textual solution. Reasoning with text is naturally challenging and this is particularly so with text reuse. However significant inroads towards addressing this challenge was made possible with knowledge of problem-solution alignment. This knowledge allows us to identify specific parts of a textual solution that are linked to particular problem attributes or attribute values. Accordingly, a text reuse strategy based on implicit alignment is presented to determine textual solution constructs (words or phrases) that needs adapted. This addresses the question of what to reuse in solution texts and thereby forms the first contribution of this thesis. A generic architecture, the Case Retrieval Reuse Net (CR2N), is used to formalise the reuse strategy. Functionally, this architecture annotates textual constructs in a solution as reusable with adaptation or without adaptation. Key to this annotation is the discovery of reuse evidence mined from neighbourhood characteristics. Experimental results show significant improvements over a retrieve-only system and a baseline reuse technique. We also extended CR2N so that retrieval of similar cases is informed by solutions that are easiest to adapt. This is done by retrieving the top k cases based on their problem similarity and then determining the reusability of their solutions with respect to the target problem. Results from experiments show that reuse-guided retrieval outperforms retrieval without this guidance. Although CR2N exploits implicit alignment to aid text reuse, performance can be greatly improved if there is explicit alignment. Our second contribution is a method to form explicit alignment of structured problem attributes and values to sentences in a textual solution. Thereafter, compositional and transformational approaches to text reuse are introduced to address the question of how to reuse textual solutions. The main idea in the compositional approach is to generate a textual solution by using prototypical sentences across similar authors. While the transformation approach adapts the retrieved solution text by replacing sentences aligned to mismatched problem attributes using sentences from the neighbourhood. Experiments confirm the usefulness of these approaches through strong similarity between generated text and human references. The third and final contribution of this research is the use of Machine Translation (MT) evaluation metrics for TCBR. These metrics have been shown to correlate highly with human expert evaluation. In MT research, multiple human references are typically used as opposed to a single reference or solution per test case. An introspective approach to create multiple references for evaluation is presented. This is particularly useful for CBR domains where single reference cases (or cases with a single solution per problem) typically form the casebase. For such domains we show how multiple references can be generated by exploiting the CBR similarity assumption. Results indicate that TCBR systems evaluated with these MT metrics are closer to human judgements

Query Expansion: Is It Necessary In Textual Case-Based Reasoning?

Query expansion (QE) is the process of transforming a seed query to improve retrieval performance in information retrieval operations. It is often intended to overcome a vocabulary mismatch between the query and the document collection. Query expansion is known to improve retrieval effectiveness of some information retrieval systems, however, its effect in Textual Case-based reasoning (TCBR) which is closely related to the field of Information Retrieval has not been well studied. In this research, a TCBR System intended for storage and retrieval of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) named FAQCase was developed. Experiments were conducted to examine the effect of synonym-based query expansion on the system. The result has shown that there is significant retrieval improvement in FAQCase with query expansion over FAQCase without query expansion, in a situation where vocabulary mismatch between new questions and the stored FAQs is high.Keywords: Query expansion, Textual case-based reasoning, Word sense disambiguation, WordNetNigerian Journal of Basic and Applied Science (2011), 19 (2): 269-27

Investigating graphs in textual case-based reasoning

Advances in Case-Based Reasoning: Proceedings of the Seventh European Conference, ECCBR 2004: pp.573-586.Textual case-based reasoning (TCBR) provides the ability to reason with domain-specific knowledge when experiences exist in text. Ideally, we would like to find an inexpensive way to automatically, efficiently, and accurately represent textual documents as cases. One of the challenges, however, is that current automated methods that manipulate text are not always useful because they are either expensive (based on natural language processing) or they do not take into account word order and negation (based on statistics) when interpreting textual sources. Recently, Schenker et al. [1] introduced an algorithm to convert textual documents into graphs that conserves and conveys the order and structure of the source text in the graph representation. Unfortunately, the resulting graphs cannot be used as cases because they do not take domain knowledge into consideration. Thus, the goal of this study is to investigate the potential benefit, if any, of this new algorithm to TCBR. For this purpose, we conducted an experiment to evaluate variations of the algorithm for TCBR. We discuss the potential contribution of this algorithm to existing TCBR approaches

TAAABLE: Text Mining, Ontology Engineering, and Hierarchical Classification for Textual Case-Based Cooking

International audienceThis paper presents how the Taaable project addresses the textual case-based reasoning challenge of the CCC, thanks to a combination of principles, methods, and technologies of various fields of knowledge-based system technologies, namely CBR, ontology engineering manual and semi-automatic), data and text-mining using textual resources of the Web, text annotation (used as an indexing technique), knowledge representation, and hierarchical classification. Indeed, to be able to reason on textual cases, indexing them by a formal representation language using a formal vocabulary has proven to be useful

A Textual Case-Based Mobile Phone Diagnosis Support System

Java Cases and Ontology Libraries Integration for Building Reasoning Infrastructures (jCOLIBRI) is a framework which makes the development of Textual Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) applications easier by providing the preprocessing of text methods, textual similarity methods and appropriate representation for textual cases which are the major techniques needed in any CBR systems. In this paper, a Mobile Phone Diagnosis Support System is presented as an extension to jCOLIBRI which accepts a problem and reasons with cases to provide a solution related to a new given problem. Experimental evaluation using some set of problems shows that the developed system predicts the solution that is relatively closer to the user given mobile phone problem. The solution also provide the user valuable advise on how to go about solving the new problem

On legal texts and cases

Textual Case-Based Reasoning: Papers from the 1998 Workshop, Technical Report WS-98-12: pp. 40-50.The search employed by judicial professionals when seeking for past similar legal decisions is known as jurisprudence research. Humans employ analogical reasoning when comparing a given actual situation with past decisions, noting the affinities between them. In the process of being reminded of a similar situation when faced to a new one, Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) systems simulate analogical reasoning. Judicial professionals have two sources of jurisprudence research: books and database systems. The search in books is time-consuming and imprecise due to the limitations of humans' memory. Available text database systems do not guarantee the retrieval of useful documents. PRUDENTIA is the case-based reasoner tailored to the Brazilian system that confers efficiency to jurisprudence research. Judicial cases are described with natural language text, comprising a collection of textual documents. These texts are the experiences that require case engineering to be modeled in a structured representation of cases. We have developed an automatic means of performing the case engineering, that is, converting legal texts into structured representation of cases. Examples of PRUDENTIA demonstrate the power of similarity-based retrieval in a textual CBR system against text database applications improving the usefulness of the documents retrieved

A knowledge acquisition tool to assist case authoring from texts.

Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) is a technique in Artificial Intelligence where a new problem is solved by making use of the solution to a similar past problem situation. People naturally solve problems in this way, without even thinking about it. For example, an occupational therapist (OT) that assesses the needs of a new disabled person may be reminded of a previous person in terms of their disabilities. He may or may not decide to recommend the same devices based on the outcome of an earlier (disabled) person. Case-based reasoning makes use of a collection of past problem-solving experiences thus enabling users to exploit the information of others successes and failures to solve their own problem(s). This project has developed a CBR tool to assist in matching SmartHouse technology to the needs of the elderly and people with disabilities. The tool makes suggestions of SmartHouse devices that could assist with given impairments. SmartHouse past problem-solving textual reports have been used to obtain knowledge for the CBR system. Creating a case-based reasoning system from textual sources is challenging because it requires that the text be interpreted in a meaningful way in order to create cases that are effective in problem-solving and to be able to reasonably interpret queries. Effective case retrieval and query interpretation is only possible if a domain-specific conceptual model is available and if the different meanings that a word can take can be recognised in the text. Approaches based on methods in information retrieval require large amounts of data and typically result in knowledge-poor representations. The costs become prohibitive if an expert is engaged to manually craft cases or hand tag documents for learning. Furthermore, hierarchically structured case representations are preferred to flat-structured ones for problem-solving because they allow for comparison at different levels of specificity thus resulting in more effective retrieval than flat structured cases. This project has developed SmartCAT-T, a tool that creates knowledge-rich hierarchically structured cases from semi-structured textual reports. SmartCAT-T highlights important phrases in the textual SmartHouse problem-solving reports and uses the phrases to create a conceptual model of the domain. The model then becomes a standard structure onto which each semi-structured SmartHouse report is mapped in order to obtain the correspondingly structured case. SmartCAT-T also relies on an unsupervised methodology that recognises word synonyms in text. The methodology is used to create a uniform vocabulary for the textual reports and the resulting harmonised text is used to create the standard conceptual model of the domain. The technique is also employed in query interpretation during problem solving. SmartCAT-T does not require large sets of tagged data for learning, and the concepts in the conceptual model are interpretable, allowing for expert refinement of knowledge. Evaluation results show that the created cases contain knowledge that is useful for problem solving. An improvement in results is also observed when the text and queries are harmonised. A further evaluation highlights a high potential for the techniques developed in this research to be useful in domains other than SmartHouse. All this has been implemented in the Smarter case-based reasoning system