Artificial Intelligence

Knowledge representation
Fall 2008
professor: Luigi Ceccaroni

Introduction
Knowledge engineers and system
analysts need to bring knowledge forth
and make it explicit. (Why?)
They display the implicit knowledge about
a subject in a form that programmers can
encode in algorithms and data structures.
To make the hidden knowledge accessible
to computers, knowledge-based
systems and object-oriented systems
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are needed.

Introduction
Knowledge-based and object-oriented systems
are built around declarative languages:
Forms of expression closer to human languages

Such systems help to express the knowledge in

a form that both humans and computers can
understand.
This part of the course is about knowledge-base
analysis and design:
To analyze knowledge about the real world and map
it to a computable form
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Logic, ontology and

computation
Knowledge representation (KR) is an
interdisciplinary subject that applies
theories and techniques from three fields:
Logic provides the formal structure and
rules of inference.
Ontology defines the kinds of things that
exist in the application domain.
Computation supports the applications that
distinguish KR from pure philosophy.
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Principles of knowledge
representation
Knowledge engineering is the application
of logic and ontology to the task of
building computable models of some
domain for some purpose.
In 1993, three experts in KR, Davis,
Schrobe and Szolovits, wrote a critical
review and analysis of the state of the art:
Five basic principles about knowledge
representations (KRs) and their role in
artificial intelligence
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What is a
knowledge representation?
1. A surrogate
Imperfect surrogates mean incorrect inferences are
inevitable
2. A set of ontological commitments
Commitment begins with the earliest choices
The commitments accumulate in layers
Reminder: a KR is not a data structure
3. A fragmentary theory of intelligent reasoning
What is intelligent reasoning?
Which inferences are sanctioned?
Which inferences are recommended?
4. A medium for efficient computation
5. A medium of human expression

A KR is a surrogate
Description of something else
Abstract, simplified view of a domain
Symbolic structure with formal symbol-manipulating
rules
Rules are based only on the syntactic form of the
representation

Requires specification of mapping to intended

referent:
an interpretation

Contains simplifying assumptions and inaccuracies

Susceptible to supporting incorrect reasoning
results

A KR is a set of ontological
commitments
What to consider in thinking about a
world: concepts, relations, objects
Example: representing an electric circuit
Lumped element model
Components with connections between them
Signals flowing instantaneously along the connections

Electrodynamics model
Signals propagating at finite speeds
Locations of and distances between components
Components through which electromagnetic waves flow

KR is not about data structures

A KR is a set of ontological
commitments
An ontological commitment is an agreement
to use a vocabulary (i.e., ask queries and
make assertions) in a way that is consistent
(but not complete) with respect to the
theory specified by an ontology. We build
agents that commit to ontologies. We
design ontologies so we can share
knowledge with and among these agents.
Tom Gruber (KSL, Stanford)

A KR is a fragmentary theory of
intelligent reasoning
It provides different strategies for
reasoning.
These strategies can be used by humans and
computers.

It sanctions a set of inferences.

What can we infer from what we know?

It recommends a set of inferences.

What ought we to infer from what we know?

A KR is a medium for efficient

computation
Reasoning in machines is a computational
process:
Both the procedural and the declarative
approaches can be transformed to a
computable form.

Computational efficiency is a central

design goal.
Expressivity and tractability of reasoning
are traded off.

A KR is a medium of human
expression
How useful is it as a medium of expression?
How general is it?
How precise is it?
For what tasks does it provide expressive adequacy?

How useful is it as a medium of communication?

Can we easily talk or think in the representation
language?
What kinds of things are easily said in the language?
What kinds of things are so difficult to say in the
language as to be pragmatically impossible?

KRs vs. data bases

Both represent knowledge.
Standard data bases do not contain:
disjunctions (e.g., The ball is either red or blue.)
quantifiers (e.g., Every person has two parents.)

Data base schema provide some quantified information

Deductive data bases include implications
Data base research concerns:
Efficient access and management of large distributed data
bases
Concurrent updating

KR research concerns:
Expressivity
Effective reasoning

What is a knowledge base

(KB)?
An informal term for a collection of
information that includes an ontology as
one component.
Besides an ontology, a KB may contain
information specified in a declarative
language such as logic or expert-system
rules.
It may also include unstructured or
unformalized information expressed in
natural language or procedural code. 14

Issues in KR research
What knowledge needs to be represented
to answer given questions?
How is incomplete or noisy information
represented?
How is qualitative or abstracted knowledge
represented?
How can knowledge be encoded so that it
is reusable?
How are assumptions represented and
reasoned with?

Issues in KR research
How can knowledge be reformulated for a
given purpose?
How can effective automatic reasoning be
done with large-scale knowledge bases?
How can computer-interpretable
knowledge be extracted from documents?
How can knowledge from multiple sources
be combined and used?

Issues in KR research
This is a world where massive amounts of
data and applied mathematics replace every
other tool:
Out with every theory of human behavior, from
linguistics to sociology.
Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology.

Who knows why people do what they do?

The point is they do it, and we can track and
measure it with unprecedented fidelity.
With enough data, the numbers speak for
themselves.
Chris Anderson

Historical background
The words knowledge and representation have
provoked philosophical controversies for over
2500 years.
500 B.C.: Socrates claims to know very little, if
anything.
He destroyed the self-satisfaction of people who
claimed to have knowledge of fundamental
subjects like:

Truth
Beauty
Virtue
Justice

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Historical background
For his impiety in questioning cherished
beliefs, Socrates was condemned to death as
a corrupter of the morals Athenian youth.
Socrates student Plato established the subject
of epistemology:
the study of the nature of knowledge and its
justification

Platos student Aristotle shifted the emphasis

of philosophy from the nature of knowledge to
the less controversial but more practical
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problem of representing knowledge.

Historical background
Aristotles work resulted in an encyclopedic
compilation of the knowledge of his day.
But before he could compile that
knowledge, he had to invent the words for
representing it.
He established the initial terminology and
defined the scope of logic, physics,
metaphysics, biology, psychology,
linguistics, politics, ethics, rhetoric and
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economics.

Historical background
Terms that Aristotle coined or adopted have
become the core of todays international
technical vocabulary:

category
metaphor
hypothesis
quantity
quality
species
noun
... and then artificial intelligence arrived.

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Early history of KR (60s - 70s)

Origins
Problem solving work primarily at CMU and MIT
Natural language understanding

Many ad hoc formalisms

Procedural vs. declarative knowledge
Procedural: functions, rules, conventional
programming languages
Declarative: logic, Prolog

No formal semantics

Emerging paradigms
(70s - 80s)
Semantic nets
Unstructured node-link graphs

No semantics to support interpretation

No axioms to support reasoning
Reference:
Whats in a Link: Foundations for Semantic Nets; Woods, W. A.
In Representation and Understanding: Studies in Cognitive Science;
edited by D. Bobrow and A. Collins; Academic Press; 1975.

Emerging paradigms
(70s - 80s)
Frames
Structured semantic nets
Object-oriented descriptions
Prototypes
Class-subclass taxonomies
Reference:
A Framework for Representing Knowledge M.
Minsky
Mind Design; J. Haugeland, editor; MIT Press; 1981.

Example: Frames: classsubclass taxonomy

Example: Frames: Class frame

Example: Frames: Instance

frame

Emerging paradigms
(70s - 80s)
Production rule systems
If-then inference rules
If (warning-light on) then (engine overheating)
If (warning-light on) then ((engine overheating)
0.95)

Situation-action rules
If (warning-light on) then (turn-off engine)

Hybrid procedural-declarative representation

Basis for expert systems

Emerging paradigms
(70s - 80s)
Qualitative physics
Representing and reasoning:
With incomplete knowledge
About physical mechanisms

Qualitative descriptions
Capture distinctions that make an important
qualitative difference and ignores others
Aggregate values that have no qualitative
difference

Emerging paradigms
(70s - 80s)
Symbolic Logic
Primarily first-order logic
Everybody loves somebody sometime.
(forall ?p (implies (Person ?p1)
(exists (?p2 ?t) (and

(Person ?p2)
(Time ?t)
(Loves ?p1 ?p2 ?t)))))

Resolution theorem proving

KR in the 90s and 00s

Declarative representations

Easier to change
Multi-use
Extendable by reasoning
Accessible for introspection

Formal semantics
Defines what the representation means
Specifies correct reasoning
Allows comparison of representations/algorithms

KR rooted in the study of logics

temporal, context, modal, default, nonmonotonic...

Rigorous theoretical analysis