Artificial Intelligence Notes

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”.

“An Expert System is a set of programs that manipulates embedded knowledge

to solve problems in a specialized domain that normally requires human
expertise”.

Characteristics of an Expert System:

 They should solve difficult programs in a domain as good as or better than
human experts.
 They should possess vast quantities of domain-specific knowledge to the
minute details.
 These systems permit the use of heuristic search process.
 They explain why they ask a question and justify their conclusions.
 They deal with uncertain and irrelevant data.
 They communicate with the users in their own natural language.
 They possess the capacity to cater the individual’s desire.
 They provide extensive facilities for ‘symbolic processing’ rather than
‘numeric processing’.
  A final characteristic is from the point of economists and financial people:
They should mint money. Expert Systems need heavy investment and there
should be considerable ‘Return on Investment’ (ROI).

Architecture and Modules of Expert System

The fundamental modules of an expert system are:-

 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:

 To get remedies for his problem.

 To know the private knowledge (heuristics) of the system.
 To get some explanations for specific queries.

Presenting a real-world problem to the system for a solution is what is meant

in having a consultation. Here, the user-interface provides as much facilities as
possible such as menus, graphical interface etc. to make the dialogue user-
friendly and lively.
3. Inference Engine: Also called as ‘rule interpreter’ an inference engine (IE),
performs the task of matching antecendents from the responses given by the
user and firing rules.

Basically there are two approaches:-

Forward Chaining- This works by matching the existing conditions of the

problem (given facts) with the antecendents of the rule in the knowledge base.
Forward chaining is also known as data driven search or antecendent search.

Backward Chaining- This is a reverse process of forward chaining. Here the

rule interpreter tries to match the ‘THEN condition’ instead of the ‘IF
condition’. Because of this backward chaining is also called consequent driven
or goal driven search.

4. Explanation Facility: Getting answers to specific queries forms the explanation

mechanism of the expert system. Basically any user would like to ask the
following basic questions ‘why’ & ‘how’.

Conventional programs do not provide these facilities. Explanation facility

helps the user in the following ways:-

 If the user is a domain expert, it helps in identifying what additional

knowledge is needed.
 Enhances the user’s confidence in the system.
 Serves as a tutor in sharing the System’s knowledge with the user.
 Explanation Facility is a part of the user interface that carries out the
above tasks.

5. Knowledge Acquisition Facility: The major bottleneck in Expert System

development is knowledge acquisition. Knowledge Acquisition facility creates a
congenial atmosphere for the expert to share the expertise with the system.
KAF creates a congenial atmosphere for the expert to share the expertise with
the system.
6. External Interface: This provides the communication between the Expert
System and the external environment. When there is a formal consultation, it
is done via the user interface. In real time expert systems when they form a
part of the closed loop system, it is not proper to expect human intervention
every time to feed in the conditions prevailing & get remedies. Moreover,
the time gap is too narrow in real time system. The external interface with its
sensors gets the minute by minute information about the situation & act
accordingly.

Knowledge Acquisition Strategies:

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:-

a) Problem Description- In problem description, the expert is asked to give

sample problems, for each category of answer. This method will help in
identifying the foundational characteristics of the problems.

b) Problem Discussion- Problem discussion method involves discussion about a

problem to the domain expert. The needed data, knowledge and procedures
 evolve by this method. Knowledge of finer granularity emerges from the
discussion.

c) Problem Analysis: The problem analysis part is similar to protocol analysis,

wherein the expert is presented with a series of problems and asked to think
and find solutions for the same.

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.

Difficulties in Knowledge Acquisition

 Domain experts store their private knowledge subconsciously. They do not

keep a written record of their heuristics. So, unless and until a problem
comes that needs that private piece of knowledge, it remains passive and
hidden.
 Domain experts have the problem of effective communication. Most
experts find it difficult to explain their reasoning process. Lack of proper
communications makes knowledge acquisition process very tedious and
inefficient.
 Much of the human expertise is basically intuitive which is the capability of
skilled pattern recognition. Intuition is very hard to verbalize.