A New Approach to Expert System Explanations
Abstract
Expert systems were one of the first applications to emerge from initial research in artificial intelligence, and the explanation of expert system reasoning was one of the first applications of natural language generation. This is because the need for explanations is obvious, and generation from a knowledge-based application such as reasoning should be relatively straightforward. However, while explanation has been universally acknowledged as a desirable functionality in expert systems, natural language generation has not taken a central place in contemporary expert system development. For example, a popular text book about expert systems such as (Giarratano and Riley, 1994) stresses twice in the introduction the importance of explanation, but provides no further mention of explanation in the remaining 600 pages. (The book is based on the popular CLIPS framework.) In this paper, we present a new approach to enhancing an expert system with an explanation facility. The approach comprises both software components and a methodology for assembling the components. The methodology is minimally intrusive into existing expert system development practice. This paper is structured as follows. In Section 2, we discuss previous work and identify shortcomings. We present our analysis of knowledge types in Section 3. Section 4 presents the Security Assistant and its explanation facility. Finally, we sketch a general methodology for explainable expert system engineering in Section 5.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Aug 01, 1998
- Accession Number
- ADA457707
Entities
People
- Benoit Lavoie
- Daryl Mccullough
- Jonathan Decristofaro
- Owen Rambow
- Regina Barzilay
- Tanya Korelsky