UNIT II

Introduction to Expert Systems

 An expert system is a computer program that is designed to solve complex problems and to provide
decision-making ability like a human expert. It performs this by extracting knowledge from its
knowledge base using the reasoning and inference rules according to the user queries.
 The performance of an expert system is based on the expert's knowledge stored in its knowledge base.
The more knowledge stored in the KB, the more that system improves its performance. One of the
common examples of an ES is a suggestion of spelling errors while typing in the Google search box.

Capabilities of the Expert System

Below are some capabilities of an Expert System:
 Advising: It is capable of advising the human being for the query of any domain from the particular
ES.
 Provide decision-making capabilities: It provides the capability of decision making in any domain,
such as for making any financial decision, decisions in medical science, etc.
 Demonstrate a device: It is capable of demonstrating any new products such as its features,
specifications, how to use that product, etc.
 Problem-solving: It has problem-solving capabilities.
 Explaining a problem: It is also capable of providing a detailed description of an input problem.
 Interpreting the input: It is capable of interpreting the input given by the user.
 Predicting results: It can be used for the prediction of a result.
 Diagnosis: An ES designed for the medical field is capable of diagnosing a disease without using
multiple components as it already contains various inbuilt medical tools.

Advantages of Expert System

 These systems are highly reproducible.
 They can be used for risky places where the human presence is not safe.
 Error possibilities are less if the KB contains correct knowledge.
 The performance of these systems remains steady as it is not affected by emotions, tension, or fatigue.
 They provide a very high speed to respond to a particular query.

Limitations of Expert System

 The response of the expert system may get wrong if the knowledge base contains the wrong
information.
 Like a human being, it cannot produce a creative output for different scenarios.
 Its maintenance and development costs are very high.
 Knowledge acquisition for designing is much difficult.
 For each domain, we require a specific ES, which is one of the big limitations.
 It cannot learn from itself and hence requires manual updates.

Applications of Expert System

 In designing and manufacturing domain - It can be broadly used for designing and manufacturing
physical devices such as camera lenses and automobiles.
 In the knowledge domain - These systems are primarily used for publishing the relevant knowledge
to the users. The two popular ES used for this domain is an advisor and a tax advisor.
 In the finance domain - In the finance industries, it is used to detect any type of possible fraud,
suspicious activity, and advise bankers that if they should provide loans for business or not.
 In the diagnosis and troubleshooting of devices - In medical diagnosis, the ES system is used, and
it was the first area where these systems were used.
 Planning and Scheduling - The expert systems can also be used for planning and scheduling some
particular tasks for achieving the goal of that task.
Architecture of Expert System
Below is the block diagram that represents the working of an expert system:

Components of Expert System

An expert system mainly consists of three components:
 User Interface
 Inference Engine
 Knowledge Base

1. User Interface
With the help of a user interface, the expert system interacts with the user, takes queries as an input in a
readable format, and passes it to the inference engine. After getting the response from the inference engine, it
displays the output to the user. In other words, it is an interface that helps a non-expert user to communicate
with the expert system to find a solution.

2. Inference Engine (Rules of Engine)

 The inference engine is known as the brain of the expert system as it is the main processing unit of the
system. It applies inference rules to the knowledge base to derive a conclusion or deduce new
information. It helps in deriving an error-free solution of queries asked by the user.
 With the help of an inference engine, the system extracts the knowledge from the knowledge base.

There are two types of inference engine:

 Deterministic Inference engine: The conclusions drawn from this type of inference engine are
assumed to be true. It is based on facts and rules.
 Probabilistic Inference engine: This type of inference engine contains uncertainty in conclusions,
and based on the probability.
Inference engine uses the below modes to derive the solutions:
 Forward Chaining: It starts from the known facts and rules, and applies the inference rules to add
their conclusion to the known facts.
 Backward Chaining: It is a backward reasoning method that starts from the goal and works backward
to prove the known facts.

3. Knowledge Base
 The knowledgebase is a type of storage that stores knowledge acquired from the different experts of
the particular domain. It is considered as big storage of knowledge. The more the knowledge base, the
more precise will be the Expert System.
 It is similar to a database that contains information and rules of a particular domain or subject.
 One can also view the knowledge base as collections of objects and their attributes. Such as a Lion is
an object and its attributes are it is a mammal, it is not a domestic animal, etc.

Components of Knowledge Base:

 Factual Knowledge: The knowledge which is based on facts and accepted by knowledge engineers
comes under factual knowledge.
 Heuristic Knowledge: This knowledge is based on practice, the ability to guess, evaluation, and
experiences.

Representation and organization of knowledge

An Artificial intelligence system has the following components for displaying intelligent behavior:
 Perception
 Learning
 Knowledge Representation and Reasoning
 Planning
 Execution

The above diagram is showing how an AI system can interact with the real world and what components help
it to show intelligence. AI system has Perception component by which it retrieves information from its
environment. It can be visual, audio or another form of sensory input. The learning component is responsible
for learning from data captured by Perception comportment. In the complete cycle, the main components are
knowledge representation and Reasoning. These two components are involved in showing the intelligence in
machine-like humans. These two components are independent with each other but also coupled together. The
planning and execution depend on analysis of Knowledge representation and reasoning.

Approaches to knowledge representation:

There are mainly four approaches to knowledge representation, which are given below:

1. Simple relational knowledge:

 It is the simplest way of storing facts which uses the relational method, and each fact about a set of the
object is set out systematically in columns.
  This approach of knowledge representation is famous in database systems where the relationship
between different entities is represented.
 This approach has little opportunity for inference.
 Example: The following is the simple relational knowledge representation.
Player Weight Age
Player1 65 23
Player2 58 18
Player3 75 24

2. Inheritable knowledge:
 In the inheritable knowledge approach, all data must be stored into a hierarchy of classes.
 All classes should be arranged in a generalized form or a hierarchal manner.
 In this approach, we apply inheritance property.
 Elements inherit values from other members of a class.
 This approach contains inheritable knowledge which shows a relation between instance and class, and
it is called instance relation.
 Every individual frame can represent the collection of attributes and its value.
 In this approach, objects and values are represented in Boxed nodes.
 We use Arrows which point from objects to their values.
 Example:

3. Inferential knowledge:
 Inferential knowledge approach represents knowledge in the form of formal logics.
 This approach can be used to derive more facts.
 It guaranteed correctness.
 Example: Let's suppose there are two statements:
1. Marcus is a man
2. All men are mortal
Then it can represent as;
man(Marcus)
∀x = man (x) ----------> mortal (x)s

4. Procedural knowledge:
 Procedural knowledge approach uses small programs and codes which describes how to do specific
things, and how to proceed.
 In this approach, one important rule is used which is If-Then rule.
 In this knowledge, we can use various coding languages such as LISP language and Prolog language.
 We can easily represent heuristic or domain-specific knowledge using this approach.
 But it is not necessary that we can represent all cases in this approach.
Requirements for knowledge Representation system:
A good knowledge representation system must possess the following properties.
1. Representational Accuracy: KR system should have the ability to represent all kind of required
knowledge.
2. Inferential Adequacy: KR system should have ability to manipulate the representational structures to
produce new knowledge corresponding to existing structure.
3. Inferential Efficiency: The ability to direct the inferential knowledge mechanism into the most
productive directions by storing appropriate guides.
4. Acquisitional efficiency- The ability to acquire the new knowledge easily using automatic methods.

Characteristics of Expert System

An expert system is usually designed to have the following general characteristics.
 High level Performance: The system must be capable of responding at a level of competency equal
to or better than an expert system in the field. The quality of the advice given by the system should be
in a high-level integrity and for which the performance ratio should be also very high.
 Domain Specificity: Expert systems are typically very domain specific. For ex., a diagnostic expert
system for troubleshooting computers must actually perform all the necessary data manipulation as a
human expert would. The developer of such a system must limit his or her scope of the system to just
what is needed to solve the target problem. Special tools or programming languages are often needed
to accomplish the specific objectives of the system.
 Good Reliability: The expert system must be as reliable as a human expert.
 Understandable: The system should be understandable i.e. be able to explain the steps of reasoning
while executing. The expert system should have an explanation capability similar to the reasoning
ability of human experts.
 Adequate Response time: The system should be designed in such a way that it is able to perform
within a small amount of time, comparable to or better than the time taken by a human expert to reach
at a decision point. An expert system that takes a year to reach a decision compared to a human expert’s
time of one hour would not be useful.
 Use symbolic representations: Expert system use symbolic representations for knowledge (rules,
networks or frames) and perform their inference through symbolic computations that closely resemble
manipulations of natural language.
 Linked with Metaknowledge: Expert systems often reason with metaknowledge i.e. they reason with
knowledge about themselves and their own knowledge limits and capabilities. The use of
metaknowledge is quite interactive and simple for various data representations.
 Expertise knowledge: Real experts not only produce good solutions but also find them quickly. So,
an expert system must be skilful in applying its knowledge to produce solutions both efficiently and
effectively by using the intelligence human experts.
 Justified Reasoning: This allows the users to ask the expert system to justify the solution or advice
provided by it. Normally, expert systems justify their answers or advice by explaining their reasoning.
If a system is a rule-based system, it provides to the user all the rules and facts it has used to achieve
its answer.
 Explaining capability: Expert systems are capable of explaining how a particular conclusion was
reached and why requested information is needed during a consultation. This is very important as it
gives the user a chance to access and understand the system’s reasoning ability, thereby improving the
user’s confidence in the system.
 Special Programming Languages: Expert systems are typically written in special programming
languages. The use of languages like LISP and PROLOG in the development of an expert system
simplifies the coding process. The major advantage of these languages, as compared to conventional
programming languages is the simplicity of the addition, elimination or substitution of new rules and
memory management capabilities.
Some of the distinguishing characteristics of programming languages needed for expert system work
are as follows:
  Efficient mix of integer and real variables.
 Good memory management procedures.
 Extensive data manipulation routines.
 Incremental compilation.
 Tagged memory architecture.
 Efficient search procedures.
 Optimization of the systems environment.

Types of problems handled by Expert system

An ES is no substitute for a knowledge worker's overall performance of the problem-solving task. But these
systems can dramatically reduce the amount of work the individual must do to solve a problem, and they do
leave people with the creative and innovative aspects of problem solving. Below are some capabilities of an
Expert System:
 Advising: It is capable of advising the human being for the query of any domain from the particular
ES.
 Provide decision-making capabilities: It provides the capability of decision making in any domain,
such as for making any financial decision, decisions in medical science, etc.
 Demonstrate a device: It is capable of demonstrating any new products such as its features,
specifications, how to use that product, etc.
 Problem-solving: It has problem-solving capabilities.
 Explaining a problem: It is also capable of providing a detailed description of an input problem.
 Interpreting the input: It is capable of interpreting the input given by the user.
 Predicting results: It can be used for the prediction of a result.
 Diagnosis: An ES designed for the medical field is capable of diagnosing a disease without using
multiple components as it already contains various inbuilt medical tools.
 An Es can complete its part of the tasks much faster than a human expert.
 The error rate of successful systems is low, sometimes much lower than the human error rate for the
same task.
 ESs make consistent recommendations
 ESs are a convenient vehicle for bringing to the point of application difficult-to-use sources of
knowledge.
 ESs can capture the scarce expertise of a uniquely qualified expert.
 ESs can become a vehicle for building up organizational knowledge, as opposed to the knowledge of
individuals in the organization.
 When use as training vehicles, ESs result in a faster learning curve for novices.
 The company can operate an ES in environments hazardous for humans.

Expert System Tools

Techniques of Knowledge representation
There are mainly four ways of knowledge representation which are given as follows:
1. Logical Representation
2. Semantic Network Representation
 3. Frame Representation
4. Production Rules

1. Logical Representation
Logical representation is a language with some concrete rules which deals with propositions and has no
ambiguity in representation. Logical representation means drawing a conclusion based on various conditions.
This representation lays down some important communication rules. It consists of precisely defined syntax
and semantics which supports the sound inference. Each sentence can be translated into logics using syntax
and semantics.
Syntax:
 Syntaxes are the rules which decide how we can construct legal sentences in the logic.
 It determines which symbol we can use in knowledge representation.
 How to write those symbols.
Semantics:
 Semantics are the rules by which we can interpret the sentence in the logic.
 Semantic also involves assigning a meaning to each sentence.

Logical representation can be categorised into mainly two logics:

1. Propositional Logics
2. Predicate logics

Advantages of logical representation:

1. Logical representation enables us to do logical reasoning.
2. Logical representation is the basis for the programming languages.

Disadvantages of logical Representation:

1. Logical representations have some restrictions and are challenging to work with.
2. Logical representation technique may not be very natural, and inference may not be so efficient.

2. Semantic Network Representation

Semantic networks are alternative of predicate logic for knowledge representation. In Semantic networks, we
can represent our knowledge in the form of graphical networks. This network consists of nodes representing
objects and arcs which describe the relationship between those objects. Semantic networks can categorize the
object in different forms and can also link those objects. Semantic networks are easy to understand and can be
easily extended.

This representation consist of mainly two types of relations:

1. IS-A relation (Inheritance)
2. Kind-of-relation

Example: Following are some statements which we need to represent in the form of nodes and arcs.
Statements:
1. Jerry is a cat.
2. Jerry is a mammal
3. Jerry is owned by Priya.
4. Jerry is brown coloured.
5. All Mammals are animal.
In the above diagram, we have represented the different type of knowledge in the form of nodes and arcs.
Each object is connected with another object by some relation.

Drawbacks in Semantic representation:

1. Semantic networks take more computational time at runtime as we need to traverse the complete
network tree to answer some questions. It might be possible in the worst case scenario that after
traversing the entire tree, we find that the solution does not exist in this network.
2. Semantic networks try to model human-like memory (Which has 1015 neurons and links) to store the
information, but in practice, it is not possible to build such a vast semantic network.
3. These types of representations are inadequate as they do not have any equivalent quantifier, e.g., for
all, for some, none, etc.
4. Semantic networks do not have any standard definition for the link names.
5. These networks are not intelligent and depend on the creator of the system.

Advantages of Semantic network:

1. Semantic networks are a natural representation of knowledge.
2. Semantic networks convey meaning in a transparent manner.
3. These networks are simple and easily understandable.

3. Frame Representation
A frame is a record like structure which consists of a collection of attributes and its values to describe an entity
in the world. Frames are the AI data structure which divides knowledge into substructures by representing
stereotypes situations. It consists of a collection of slots and slot values. These slots may be of any type and
sizes. Slots have names and values which are called facets.

Facets: The various aspects of a slot is known as Facets. Facets are features of frames which enable us to put
constraints on the frames. Example: IF-NEEDED facts are called when data of any particular slot is needed.
A frame may consist of any number of slots, and a slot may include any number of facets and facets may have
any number of values. A frame is also known as slot-filter knowledge representation in artificial
intelligence.

Frames are derived from semantic networks and later evolved into our modern-day classes and objects. A
single frame is not much useful. Frames system consist of a collection of frames which are connected. In the
frame, knowledge about an object or event can be stored together in the knowledge base. The frame is a type
of technology which is widely used in various applications including Natural language processing and
machine visions.

Example: 1
Let's take an example of a frame for a book
Slots Filters
Title Artificial Intelligence
 Genre Computer Science
Author Peter Norvig
Edition Third Edition
Year 1996
Page 1152

Advantages of frame representation:

1. The frame knowledge representation makes the programming easier by grouping the related data.
2. The frame representation is comparably flexible and used by many applications in AI.
3. It is very easy to add slots for new attribute and relations.
4. It is easy to include default data and to search for missing values.
5. Frame representation is easy to understand and visualize.

Disadvantages of frame representation:

1. In frame system inference mechanism is not be easily processed.
2. Inference mechanism cannot be smoothly proceeded by frame representation.
3. Frame representation has a much generalized approach.

4. Production Rules
Production rules system consist of (condition, action) pairs which mean, "If condition then action". It has
mainly three parts:
 The set of production rules
 Working Memory
 The recognize-act-cycle

In production rules agent checks for the condition and if the condition exists then production rule fires and
corresponding action is carried out. The condition part of the rule determines which rule may be applied to a
problem. And the action part carries out the associated problem-solving steps. This complete process is called
a recognize-act cycle.

The working memory contains the description of the current state of problems-solving and rule can write
knowledge to the working memory. This knowledge match and may fire other rules.
If there is a new situation (state) generates, then multiple production rules will be fired together, this is called
conflict set. In this situation, the agent needs to select a rule from these sets, and it is called a conflict resolution.

Example:
 IF (at bus stop AND bus arrives) THEN action (get into the bus)
 IF (on the bus AND paid AND empty seat) THEN action (sit down).
 IF (on bus AND unpaid) THEN action (pay charges).
 IF (bus arrives at destination) THEN action (get down from the bus).

Advantages of Production rule:

1. The production rules are expressed in natural language.
2. The production rules are highly modular, so we can easily remove, add or modify an individual rule.

Disadvantages of Production rule:

1. Production rule system does not exhibit any learning capabilities, as it does not store the result of the
problem for the future uses.
2. During the execution of the program, many rules may be active hence rule-based production systems
are inefficient.
Knowledge Engineering
 Knowledge engineering is a field of artificial intelligence (AI) that tries to emulate the judgment and
behaviour of a human expert in a given field.
 It looks at the metadata (information about a data object that describes characteristics such as content,
quality, and format), structure and processes that are the basis of how a decision is made or conclusion
reached.
 Knowledge engineering is the technology behind the creation of expert systems to assist with issues
related to their programmed field of knowledge.
 Expert systems involve a large and expandable knowledge base integrated with a rules engine that
specifies how to apply information in the knowledge base to each particular situation. The systems
may also incorporate machine learning so that they can learn from experience in the same way that
humans do.
 Expert systems are used in various fields including healthcare, customer service, financial services,
manufacturing and the law.
 Using algorithms to emulate the thought patterns of a subject matter expert, knowledge engineering
tries to take on questions and issues as a human expert would. Looking at the structure of a task or
decision, knowledge engineering studies how the conclusion is reached.
 A library of problem-solving methods and a body of collateral knowledge are used to approach the
issue or question. The amount of collateral knowledge can be very large. Depending on the task and
the knowledge that is drawn on, the virtual expert may assist with troubleshooting, solving issues,
assisting a human or acting as a virtual agent.
 Scientists originally attempted knowledge engineering by trying to emulate real experts. Using the
virtual expert was supposed to get you the same answer as you would get from a human expert. This
approach was called the transfer approach. However, the expertise that a specialist required to answer
questions or respond to issues posed to it needed too much collateral knowledge: information that is
not central to the given issue but still applied to make judgments.
 A surprising amount of collateral knowledge is required to enable analogous reasoning and nonlinear
thought. Currently, a modelling approach is used where the same knowledge and process need not
necessarily be used to reach the same conclusion for a given question or issue. Eventually, it is
expected that knowledge engineering will produce a specialist that surpasses the abilities of its human
counterparts.
 Knowledge engineering attempts to take on challenges and solve problems that would usually require
a high level of human expertise to solve. Figure 1 illustrates the knowledge engineering pipeline.

Knowledge Engineering Processes

The knowledge engineering process includes:
 Knowledge acquisition
 Knowledge representation
 Knowledge validation
 Inferencing
 Explanation and justification
The interaction between these stages and sources of knowledge is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Knowledge engineering processes

The amount of collateral knowledge can be very large depending on the task. A number of advances in
technology and technology standards have assisted in integrating data and making it accessible. These include
the semantic web (an extension of the current web in which information is given a well-defined meaning),
cloud computing (enables access to large amounts of computational resources), and open datasets (freely
available datasets for anyone to use and republish). These advances are crucial to knowledge engineering as
they expedite data integration and evaluation.

System – building aids

The system-building aids consist of programs which help acquire and represent the domain expert’s
knowledge and programs which help design the expert system under construction. These programs address
very difficult tasks; many are research tools just beginning to evolve into practical and useful aids, although a
few are offered as full-blown commercial systems.
Compared with programming and knowledge engineering languages, relatively few system-building aids have
been developed. Those which exist fall into two major categories; design aids and knowledge acquisition aids.
The AGE system exemplifies design aids, while TEIRSIAS, MOLE and SALT exemplify knowledge
acquisition, TIMM system construction and SEEK knowledge refinement aids.

A few of these are discussed below:

a. AGE: This software tool helps the knowledge engineer design and build an expert system. AGE
provides the user with a set of components which, like building blocks, can be assembled to form
portions of an expert system. Each component, a collection of INTERLISP functions, supports an expert
system framework, such as forward chaining, backward chaining, or a blackboard architecture.
The term blackboard refers to a central data base used by systems, to coordinate and, control the
operation of independent groups of rules called knowledge sources. The knowledge sources
communicate by writing messages on the blackboard and reading messages from other knowledge
sources.
b. MOLE: This is a knowledge acquisition system for heuristic classification problem, such as diagnosing
diseases. In particular, it is used in conjunction with the cover-and- differentiate problem solving
method. The expert-system-produced by MOLE accepts input data, comes up with a set of candidate
explanations or classifications which cover the data, then uses differentiating knowledge to determine
which one is best. The process is iterative, since explanations must themselves be justified, until
ultimate causes are ascertained.
MOLE interacts with a domain expert to produce a knowledge base which a system, called MOLE-p
(for mole performance) uses to solve problems.
 c. TEIRESIAS: TEIRESIAS was developed by Davis in the mid-1970s as a vehicle for exploring new
ideas in knowledge acquisition and data base maintenance rather than as a tool for building expert
systems, at the university of Stanford (USA).
TEIRESIAS acquires knowledge interactively from an expert. If a wrong diagnosis has been made by
MYCIN, then TEIRESIAS will lead the expert back through the chain of incorrect reasoning until the
expert states where the incorrect reasoning started. While going back through the reasoning chain,
TEIRESIAS will also interact with the expert to modify incorrect rules or acquire new rules.

Support facilities
It includes a number of tools for aiding the programming. These tools generally should be considered in the
knowledge engineering language. There are four major kinds of support facilities as follows:

 I/O facilities
 Explanation facilities
 Knowledge-base creation
 Debugging tools

Hardware support – refers to the computer on which the tools run. Naturally, the size of a tool plays major
role in choosing the appropriate machine. A very vital aspect of selecting the relevant machine is its cost. The
type of computers that a tool can be run on are for example: PC Workstations, Mainframes and others.
Capabilities of expert system building tools vary from one tool to another. Therefore, it is very job to select
an appropriate tool. There is no agreement about how one chooses a shell to use for a given application. The
successful use of expert systems building tool lies in choosing the right tool for a problem. The field also
needs further research. It requires a practical search of different tools in use and analysis of both tools
characteristics and problem domain features.

Stages in the development of Expert System

The following points highlight the five main stages to develop an expert system. The stages are:
1. Identification
2. Conceptualisation
3. Formalisation (Designing)
4. Implementation
 5. Testing (Validation, Verification and Maintenance).

Stage # 1. Identification:
Before we can begin to develop an expert system, it is important to describe, with as much precision as
possible, the problem which the system is intended to solve. It is not enough simply to feel that an expert
system would be helpful in a certain situation; we must determine the exact nature of the problem and state
the precise goals which indicate exactly how the expert system is expected to contribute to the solution.

Stage # 2. Conceptualisation:
Once it has been identified for the problem an expert system is to solve, the next stage involves analysing the
problem further to ensure that its specifics, as well as generalities, are understood.
In the conceptualisation stage, the knowledge engineer frequently creates a diagram of the problem to depict
graphically the relationships between the objects and processes in the problem domain. It is often helpful at
this stage to divide the problem into a series of sub-problems and to diagram both the relationships among the
pieces of each sub-problem and the relationships among the various sub-problems.

Stage # 3. Formalisation (Designing):

In the preceding stages, no effort has been made to relate the domain problem to the artificial intelligence
technology which may solve it. During the identification and formalization stages, the focus is entirely on
understanding the problem. Now, during the formalization stage, the problem is connected to its proposed
solution, an expert system is supplied by analysing the relationships depicted in the conceptualization stage.
The knowledge engineer begins to select the techniques which are appropriate for developing this particular
expert system.

Stage # 4. Implementation:
During the implementation stage the formalised concepts are programmed into the computer which has been
chosen for system development, using the predetermined techniques and tools to implement a ‘first-pass’
(prototype) of the expert system.

Theoretically, if the methods of the previous stages have been followed with diligence and care, the
implementation of the prototype should proceed smoothly.

Stage # 5. Testing (Validation, Verification and Maintenance):

The chance of prototype expert system executing flawlessly the first time it is tested are so slim as to be
virtually non-existent. A knowledge engineer does not expect the testing process to verify that the system has
been constructed entirely correctly. Rather, testing provides an opportunity to identify the weaknesses in the
structure and implementation of the system and to make the appropriate corrections.