Artificial Intelligence

UNIT- V
 Syllubus
• Expert Systems: Representing and Using
Domain Knowledge, Shell, Explanation,
Knowledge Acquisition
 Expert System

• 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.
Block diagram of Expert system

Note: It is important to remember that an expert system is not used to replace the human experts; instead, it is used to assist
the human in making a complex decision. These systems do not have human capabilities of thinking and work on the basis
of the knowledge base of the particular domain.
 popular examples of the Expert System:
• DENDRAL: It was an artificial intelligence project that was made
as a chemical analysis expert system. It was used in organic
chemistry to detect unknown organic molecules with the help
of their mass spectra and knowledge base of chemistry.
• MYCIN: It was one of the earliest backward chaining expert
systems that was designed to find the bacteria causing
infections like bacteraemia and meningitis. It was also used for
the recommendation of antibiotics and the diagnosis of blood
clotting diseases.
• PXDES: It is an expert system that is used to determine the type
and level of lung cancer. To determine the disease, it takes a
picture from the upper body, which looks like the shadow. This
shadow identifies the type and degree of harm.
• CaDeT: The CaDet expert system is a diagnostic support system
that can detect cancer at early stages.
 Characteristics of Expert System

• High Performance: The expert system provides high

performance for solving any type of complex problem
of a specific domain with high efficiency and accuracy.
• Understandable: It responds in a way that can be
easily understandable by the user. It can take input in
human language and provides the output in the same
way.
• Reliable: It is much reliable for generating an efficient
and accurate output.

• Highly responsive: ES provides the result for any

complex query within a very short period of time.
 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.

• Knowledge Representation: It is used to formalize the

knowledge stored in the knowledge base using the If-else
rules.

• Knowledge Acquisitions: It is the process of extracting,

organizing, and structuring the domain knowledge, specifying
the rules to acquire the knowledge from various experts, and
store that knowledge into the knowledge base.
•
 Development of Expert System
• Example:MYCIN
– Firstly, ES should be fed with expert knowledge. In the
case of MYCIN, human experts specialized in the medical
field of bacterial infection, provide information about the
causes, symptoms, and other knowledge in that domain.
– The KB of the MYCIN is updated successfully. In order to
test it, the doctor provides a new problem to it. The
problem is to identify the presence of the bacteria by
inputting the details of a patient, including the symptoms,
current condition, and medical history.
– The ES will need a questionnaire to be filled by the patient
to know the general information about the patient, such
as gender, age, etc
– Now the system has collected all the information,
so it will find the solution for the problem by
applying if-then rules using the inference engine
and using the facts stored within the KB.
– In the end, it will provide a response to the patient
by using the user interface
Participants in the development of Expert System

• There are three primary participants in the building of Expert

System
• Expert: The success of an ES much depends on the
knowledge provided by human experts. These experts are
those persons who are specialized in that specific domain.
• Knowledge Engineer: Knowledge engineer is the person who
gathers the knowledge from the domain experts and then
codifies that knowledge to the system according to the
formalism.
• End-User: This is a particular person or a group of people who
may not be experts, and working on the expert system needs
the solution or advice for his queries, which are complex
Why Expert System?
• No memory Limitations: It can store as much data as required and
can memorize it at the time of its application. But for human
experts, there are some limitations to memorize all things at every
time.
• High Efficiency: If the knowledge base is updated with the correct
knowledge, then it provides a highly efficient output, which may
not be possible for a human.
• Expertise in a domain: There are lots of human experts in each
domain, and they all have different skills, different experiences,
and different skills, so it is not easy to get a final output for the
query. But if we put the knowledge gained from human experts
into the expert system, then it provides an efficient output by
mixing all the facts and knowledge
• Not affected by emotions: These systems are not affected by
human emotions such as fatigue, anger, depression, anxiety, etc..
Hence the performance remains constant.
• High security: These systems provide high security to resolve any
query.
• Considers all the facts: To respond to any
query, it checks and considers all the available
facts and provides the result accordingly. But it
is possible that a human expert may not
consider some facts due to any reason.
• Regular updates improve the performance: If
there is an issue in the result provided by the
expert systems, we can improve the
performance of the system by updating the
knowledge base.
 Capabilities of the 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
• 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
 Knowledge Acquisition

• Knowledge acquisition refers to the process of

extracting, structuring, and organizing domain
knowledge from domain experts into a program.
• A knowledge engineer is an expert in AI language and
knowledge representation who investigates a particular
problem domain, determines important concepts, and
creates correct and efficient representations of the
objects and relations in the domain.
• Capturing domain knowledge of a problem domain is
the first step in building an expert system. In general,
the knowledge acquisition process through a
knowledge engineer can be divided into four phases:
• Planning: The goal is to understand the problem domain, identify domain
experts, analyze various knowledge acquisition techniques, and design
proper procedures.
• 2.
• Knowledge extraction: The goal is to extract knowledge from experts by
applying various knowledge acquisition techniques.
• 3.
• Knowledge analysis: The outputs from the knowledge extraction phase,
such as concepts and heuristics, are analyzed and represented in formal
forms, including heuristic rules, frames, objects and relations,
semantic networks, classification schemes, neural networks, and fuzzy
logic sets. These representations are used in implementing a prototype
expert system.
• 4.
• Knowledge verification: The prototype expert system containing the
formal representation of the heuristics and concepts is verified by the
experts. If the knowledge base is incomplete or insufficient to solve the
problem, alternative knowledge acquisition techniques may be applied,
and additional knowledge acquisition process may be conducted.
•