On the Use of a Primitive Formal Language and Ill-Defined Quantifiers in Knowledge Acquisition

Abstract

This paper describes a tool for knowledge acquisition and its empirical evaluation. The main characteristics are the use of a highly restricted language allowing for the expression of rules by means of cards and their combination. In order to assess the feasibility of the approach, subjects were trained in the use of a computer simulation that only gave them very general, unspecific, feedback about the internal workings of the system. It was their newly gained knowledge about how to control the system that was probed in a subsequent knowledge acquisition step. We observed substantial accuracy and also demonstrated its validity in a comparison against prior performance.