Expert Systems
| Author | Michel Mitri, Hal Kirkwood |
| Pages | 279-281 |
Page 279
Expert systems are artificial intelligence (AI) tools that capture the expertise of knowledge workers and provide advice to (usually) non-experts in a given domain. Thus, expert systems constitute a subset of the class of AI systems primarily concerned with transferring knowledge from experts to novices.
Knowledge representation systems, also called expert systems, are computerized models that capture the knowledge of one or more human experts and store it in the framework that is most appropriately suited to the reasoning processes that the experts use in their problem-solving behavior. Such systems are created by a specialized systems analyst called a knowledge engineer, whose task is to interview the expert and/or observe his problem-solving behavior, then determine the most appropriate form(s) of knowledge representation to model the expert's problem-solving techniques. This process, called knowledge acquisition, is perhaps the most difficult and time-consuming aspect of expert systems development. It requires both technical and people skills on the part of the knowledge engineer, who must establish rapport with the domain expert, maintain a productive relationship during the interviewing process, and recognize the required mapping from the expert's explanations to the appropriate knowledge representation. The knowledge engineer then encodes the expert's knowledge into a knowledge base, which is a repository of the expert's knowledge in a particular representational structure. Some of the most common knowledge representations are described below.
In addition to the knowledge base, an expert system includes an automated reasoning mechanism called an inference engine that performs calculations and/or logical processes to produce the results of a particular problem-solving session. The explanation facility of an expert system provides the user with an explanation of the reasoning process that was used to achieve the conclusion or recommendation. Each knowledge representation has a corresponding inference technique. Three very common knowledge representations are rule-based systems, frame-based systems, and case-based systems.
The types of problems that AI systems try to...
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