Enhanced Maintenance and Explanation of Expert Systems Through Explicit Models of Their Development

Principled development techniques could greatly enhance the understandability of expert systems for both users and system developers. Current systems have limited explanatory capabilities and present maintenance problems because of a failure to explicitly represent the knowledge and reasoning that went into their design. This paper describes a paradigm for constructing expert systems which attempts to identify that tacit knowledge, provide means for capturing it in the knowledge bases of expert systems, and, apply it towards more perspicuous machine-generated explanations and more consistent and maintainable system organization

Mapping Goals and Kinds of Explanations to the Knowledge Containers of Case-Based Reasoning Systems

Research on explanation in Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) is a topic that gains momentum. In this context, fundamental issues on what are and to which end do we use explanations have to be reconsidered

Explanations and Case-Based Reasoning: Foundational Issues

Abstract. By design, Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) systems do not need deep general knowledge. In contrast to (rule-based) expert systems, CBR systems can already be used with just some initial knowledge. Fur-ther knowledge can then be added manually or learned over time. CBR systems are not addressing a special group of users. Expert systems, on the other hand, are intended to solve problems similar to human ex-perts. Because of the complexity and difficulty of building and using expert systems, research in this area addressed generating explanations right from the beginning. But for knowledge-intensive CBR applications, the demand for explanations is also growing. This paper is a first pass on examining issues concerning explanations produced by CBR systems from the knowledge containers perspective. It discusses what naturally can be explained by each of the four knowledge containers (vocabulary, similarity measures, adaptation knowledge, and case base) in relation to scientific, conceptual, and cognitive explanations.