Advice-Taking and Knowledge Refinement: An Iterative View of Skill Acquisition

摘要

This paper discusses skill development as an iterative process that coverts advice into plans and, ultimately, converts these plans into behaviors. An overall model is summarized. While this framework treats learning as a largely domain-independent enterprise, it motivates two caveats. First, we believe every skill is largely domain-dependent. Whatever domain independence exists is attributable to the general skills that underlie initial skill acquisition and subsequent skill improvement. Initial skill acquisition depends on the general and complex advice-taking skills of understanding and knowledge programming. In this paper, we have developed many aspects of the advice-taking process. The second phase of learning also employs numerous and relatively general skills. In this phase, diagnostic and learning rules identify and rectify erroneous bits of knowledge. The second caveat on domain-independence recognizes the important role that domain knowledge plays in diagnosis and refinement. A learner's ability to apply diagnosis and learning rules will also depend on his or her familiarity with and expertise in the problem domain. Although these heuristic and learning rules are domain-independent, to apply these rules a learner must be able to reason deductively about and with the entailments of his or her domain knowledge.