Introducing Inductive Methods in Knowledge Acquisition By Divide-and-Conquer

In this paper we present the outline of a method that combines a divide-and-conquer approach, that is common in knowledge acquisition and software engineering, with the use of inductive techniques. The idea is to guide decomposition of a knowledge acquisition problem into subpr oblems by the expected costs and benefits of applying elicitation or induction t o acquire the knowledge for part of the target knowledge. The method is illustra ted with a "rational reconstruction" of a knowledge acquisition process that involved inductive techniques. Keywords: Knowledge acquisition, learning goals, decomposition Introduction Knowledge acquisition for knowledge-based systems involves the formalisation of human knowledge about a certain task to build a system that can perform this task. Knowledge can be acquired in different ways. The classical way is to elicit knowledge from a human expert and formalise this in an operational language, e.g. using an expert system shell. This is often extende..

Interactive Refinement for Structured Knowledge-Based Systems

This paper describes the interactive refinement of formal specifications of a structured knowledge-based system. The specification contains an explicit model of the knowledge that is to be used in problem solving and its role in problem solving. This model is used as a bias in the acquisition of domain knowledge. The model acts as bias for refinement and structures the knowledge acquisition dialogue with a user. The method has been applied in a system for learning in KADS knowledgebased systems. The system learns in two cycles. During the first cycle, the performance of the knowledge-based system is improved from experience, without modifying the initial knowledge base. During the second cycle, this knowledge base is refined interactively. 1 Introduction This research concerns the use of a model of problem solving as bias in interactive refinement of knowledge-based systems. In knowledge acquisition, knowledge elicited from various sources is used to construct or revise Knowledgebased..

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A practical guide to modelling cognitive processe