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Learning and discovery in incremental knowledge acquisition

Knowledge Based Systems (KBS) have been actively investigated since the early period of AI. There are four common methods of building expert systems: modeling approaches, programming approaches, case-based approaches and machine-learning approaches. One particular technique is Ripple Down Rules (RDR) which may be classified as an incremental case-based approach. Knowledge needs to be acquired from experts in the context of individual cases viewed by them. In the RDR framework, the expert adds a new rule based on the context of an individual case. This task is simple and only affects the expert???s workflow minimally. The rule added fixes an incorrect interpretation made by the KBS but with minimal impact on the KBS's previous correct performance. This provides incremental improvement. Despite these strengths of RDR, there are some limitations including rule redundancy, lack of intermediate features and lack of models. This thesis addresses these RDR limitations by applying automatic learning algorithms to reorganize the knowledge base, to learn intermediate features and possibly to discover domain models. The redundancy problem occurs because rules created in particular contexts which should have more general application. We address this limitation by reorganizing the knowledge base and removing redundant rules. Removal of redundant rules should also reduce the number of future knowledge acquisition sessions. Intermediate features improve modularity, because the expert can deal with features in groups rather than individually. In addition to the manual creation of intermediate features for RDR, we propose the automated discovery of intermediate features to speed up the knowledge acquisition process by generalizing existing rules. Finally, the Ripple Down Rules approach facilitates rapid knowledge acquisition as it can be initialized with a minimal ontology. Despite minimal modeling, we propose that a more developed knowledge model can be extracted from an existing RDR KBS. This may be useful in using RDR KBS for other applications. The most useful of these three developments was the automated discovery of intermediate features. This made a significant difference to the number of knowledge acquisition sessions required.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/243031
Date January 2005
CreatorsSuryanto, Hendra, Computer Science & Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, UNSW
PublisherAwarded by:University of New South Wales. School of Computer Science and Engineering
Source SetsAustraliasian Digital Theses Program
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
RightsCopyright Hendra Suryanto, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright

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