Knowledge Acquistion

The  success of knowledge based systems lies in the quality and extent of the knowledge available to the system. Acquiring and validating a large croups of consistent, correlated knowledge is not a trivial problem . This has give the acquisition process an especially important role in the design and implementation of these systems. Consequently, effective acquisition methods have become one of the principal challenges for the AI researches.

The goals of this branch of AI are the discovery and development of efficient, cost effective methods of acquisition. Some important progress has recently been made in this area with the development of sophisticated editors and some general concepts related to acquisition and learning.

Definition :- Knowledge acquisition is the process of adding new knowledge to a knowledge base and refining or otherwise improving knowledge that was previously acquired. Acquisition is usually associated with some purpose such as expanding the capabilities of a system or improving its performance at some specified task. It is goal oriented creation and refinement of knowledge . It may consist of facts, rules , concepts, procedures, heuristics, formulas, relationships, statistics or other useful information. Sources of this knowledge may include one or more of the following.

 

Experts in the domain of interest

Text Books

Technical papers

Databases

Reports

The environment

To be effective, the newly acquired knowledge should be integrated with existing knowledge in some meaningful way so that nontrivial inferences can be drawn from the resultant body of knowledge . the knowledge should, of course, be accurate, non redundant, consistent(non contradictory ), and fairly complete in the sense that it is possible to reliably reason about many of the important conclusions for which the systems was intended.

Types of learning:- Classification or taxonomy of learning types serves as a guide in studying or comparing a differences among them. One can develop learning taxonomies based on the type of knowledge representation used (predicate calculus , rules, frames), the type of knowledge learned (concepts, game playing, problem solving), or by the area of application(medical diagnosis , scheduling , prediction and so on).

The classification is intuitively more appealing and is one which has become popular among machine learning researchers . it is independent of the knowledge domain and the representation scheme is used. It is based on the type of inference strategy employed or the methods used in the learning process. The five different learning methods under this taxonomy are:

Memorization (rote learning)

Direct instruction(by being told)

Analogy

Induction

Deduction

Learning by memorization is the simplest form of learning. It requires the least5 amount of inference and is accomplished by simply copying the knowledge in the same form that it will be used directly into the knowledge base. We use this type of learning when we memorize multiplication tables ,

for example.

A slightly more complex form of learning is by direct instruction. This type of learning requires more understanding and inference than role learning since the knowledge must be transformed into an operational form before being integrated into the knowledge base. We use this type of learning when a teacher presents a number of facts directly to us in a well organized manner.

The third type listed, analogical learning, is the process of learning an ew concept or solution through the use of similar known concepts or solutions. We use this type of learning when solving problems on an examination where previously learned examples serve as a guide or when we learn to drive a truck using our knowledge of car driving. We make frewuence use of analogical learning. This form of learning requires still more inferring than either of the previous forms, since difficult transformations must be made between the known and unknown situations. This is a kind of application of knowledge in a new situation.

The fourth type of learning is also one that is used frequency by humans. It is a powerful form of learning which, like analogical learning, also requires more inferring than the first two methods. This form of learning requires the use of inductive inference, a form of invalid but useful inference. We use inductive learning when wed formulate a general concept after seeing a number of instance or examples of the concept. For example, we learn the concepts of color sweet taste after experiencing the sensation associated with several examples of colored objects or sweet foods.

The final type of acquisition is deductive learning. It is accomplished through a sequence of deductive inference steps using known facts. From the known facts, new facts or relationships are logically derived. Deductive learning usually requires more inference than the other methods. The inference method used is, of course , a deductive type, which is a valid from of inference.

In addition to the above classification, we will sometimes refer to learning methods as wither methods or knowledge-rich methods. Weak methods are general purpose methods in which little or no initial knowledge is available. These methods are more mechanical than the classical AI knowledge – rich methods. They often rely on a form of heuristics search in the learning process.