The Epistemology of a Rule-Based Expert System: A Framework for Explanation

摘要

Production rules are a popular representation for encoding heuristic knowledge in programs for scientific and medical problem solving. However, experience with one of these programs, MYCIN, indicates that the representation has serious limitations: people other than the original rule authors find it difficult to modify the rule set, and the rules are unsuitable for use in other settings, such as for application to teaching. These problems are rooted in fundamental limitations in MYCIN's original rule representation: the view that expert knowledge can be encoded as a uniform, weakly-structured set of if/then associations is found to be wanting. (Author)