Artificial Intelligence Notes Unit-4 Lecture-1 Expert Systems
Artificial Intelligence Notes Unit-4 Lecture-1 Expert Systems
Unit-4
Lecture-1
Expert Systems
The credibility of AI rose to new heights in the minds of individuals and critics
when many Expert Systems (ES) were successfully planned, developed and
implemented in many challenging areas. As of today, quite a heavy investment is
done in this area. The success of these programs in very selected areas involving
high technical expertise has left people to explore new avenues.
“Expert Systems (ES) are knowledge intensive programs that solve problems in a
domain that requires considerable amount of technical expertise”.
Knowledge Base
User Interface
Inference Engine
Explanation Facility
Knowledge Acquisition Facility
External Interface
1. Knowledge Base: The core module of any expert system is its Knowledge-Base
(KB). It is a warehouse of the domain-specific knowledge captured from the
human expert via the knowledge acquisition module. There are many ways of
representing the knowledge in the knowledge-base such as logic, semantic
nets, frames, scripts, production rules etc.
2. User Interface: User Interface provides the needed facilities for the user to
communicate with the system. A user normally would like to have a
construction with the system for the following aspects:
1. Protocol Analysis: In this method, the expert is asked to think aloud and try to
express the mental process while solving the problem. The protocol, consisting
of the knowledge engineer’s observation & expert’s thought process is
analyzed at a later stage for specific features of the type of problem. In this
method, the knowledge engineer does not interrupt while the expert is on the
work.
2. Interviews & Introspection: This is another method and most commonly used.
In this method, the knowledge engineer familiarizes the concepts about the
domain and poses questions or problems to the experts who in turn, provide
answers or solutions that help in revealing some heuristic knowledge.
3. Observation at site: In this method, the elicitor acts as a passive element and
watches the expert in actual action. Procedural knowledge is obtained by this
method.
4. Discussion about the problem: In this category there are three methods:-
5. Discussion about the system: This method involves the prototype system that
has been developed. Three major methods are:-
a) Tuning the System: In tuning the system, the domain specific expert is asked
to provide a set of classic problems and solutions are obtained from the
system. The solutions are then compared with the solutions obtained by the
human expert and the system is tuned by adding knowledge of high
granularity.
b) Verifying the system: In verifying the system, the expert is totally explained
about the intricacies of the system and is asked to verify the working of the
system. This is a tedious task.
c) Validating the system: In validating the system, the results of the system
and that of the expert are given to the outside experts to find out the validity
of the solution.