Logic aids for interviewing experts

Abstract

Abstract: The excessive time devoted to the development, testing and maintenance of expert systems (ESs) needs to be reduced radically. What is needed is general‐purpose software that can interlace the extracting, structuring, testing, and encoding of knowledge gained from debriefing the expert in any field. LAPS (Logic Aids for Problem Solving) is just such a program and has been successfully used to produce an ES in the domain of submarine diving officers. This automatically‐encoded ES was produced by each expert entering his responses to the LAPS series of strategic‐induction, AI‐jargon‐free queries. Currently, the LAPS prototype has four core sessions or functions: (1) the initial or sample‐solution session; (2) the dechunking or hidden‐knowledge session; (3) the alternatives or completeness‐testing session; and (4) the automatic rule‐production session. After any session the interviewee can use the fourth function of LAPS to produce frame‐laden rules (in M.I, for now; later, in CLIPS). These rules can of course be used to carry out consultation sessions, though fewer of these are needed. LAPS has itself been translated from M.I to C to provide a very fast program on an almost universally available platform — the microcomputer. In accord with the overall technical approach to this project, other successful offline rigorous interviewing functions are being added to LAPS. Other code additions pertain to (a) graphical and other user‐friendly reasoning‐aid enhancements; (b) a series of simpler follow‐up queries; and (c) the fleshing out of many stubs, or functions having intermediate results but as yet no processing.