Generic tasks for knowledge-based reasoning: the “right” level of abstraction for knowledge acquisition

✍ Scribed by Tom Bylander; B. Chandrasekaran

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1987
• Weight: 818 KB
• Volume: 26
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0020-7373
• DOI: 10.1016/s0020-7373(87)80093-7

✦ Synopsis

Our research strategy has been to identify generic tasks--basic combinations of knowledge structures and inference strategies that are powerful for solving certain kinds of problems. Our strategy is best understood by considering the "interaction problem", that representing knowledge for the purpose of solving some problem is strongly affected by the nature of the problem and by the inference strategy to be applied to the knowledge. The interaction problem implies that different knowledgeacquisition methodologies will be required for different kinds of reasoning, e.g. a different knowledge-acquisition methodology for each generic task. We illustrate this using the generic task of hierarchical classification. Our proposal and the interaction problem call into question many generally held beliefs about expert systems such as the belief that the knowledge base should be separated from the inference engine.