Explanation-based Generalization requires that the learner obtain an explanation of why a precedent exemplifies a concept. It is, therefore, useless if the system fails to find this explanation. However, it is not necessary to give up and resort to purely empirical generalization methods. In fact, the system may already know almost everything it needs to explain the precedent. Learning by Failing to Explain is a method which is able to exploit current knowledge to prune complex precedents, isolating the mysterious parts of the precedent. The idea has two parts: the notion of partially analyzing a precedent to get rid of the parts which are already explainable, and the notion of re-analyzing old rules in terms of new ones, so that more general rules are obtained.

The key to understanding a program is recognizing familiar algorithmic fragments and data structures in it. Automating this recognition process will make it easier to perform many tasks which require program understanding, e.g., maintenance, modification, and debugging. This report describes a recognition system, called the Recognizer, which automatically identifies occurrences of stereotyped computational fragments and data structures in programs. The Recognizer is able to identify these familiar fragments and structures, even though they may be expressed in a wide range of syntactic forms. It does so systematically and efficiently by using a parsing technique. Two important advances have made this possible. The first is a language-independent graphical representation for programs and programming structures which canonicalizes many syntactic features of programs. The second is an efficient graph parsing algorithm.