B219 Intelligent Systems

Rule-based Expert Systems

What is knowledge?

§ is a theoretical or practical understanding of a subject

or a domain.

§ is also the sim of what is currently known, and

apparently knowledge is power. Those who possess
knowledge are called experts.

§ Anyone can be considered a domain expert if he or

she has deep knowledge and strong practical
experience in a particular domain.

§ The human mental process is internal, and it is too

complex to be represented as an algorithm

§ However, most experts are capable of expressing their

knowledge in the form of rules for problem solving.

IF the ‘traffic light’ is ‘green’

THEN the action is go

IF the ‘traffic light’ is ‘red’

THEN the action is stop

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B219 Intelligent Systems

Rules as a Knowledge Representation Technique

§ The term rule in AI, which is the most commonly

used type of knowledge representation, can be
defined as an IF-THEN structure that relates given
information or facts in the IF part to some action in
the THEN part.

§ A rule provides some description of how to solve a

problem.

§ Rule are relatively easy to create and understand

§ Any rules consists of two parts: the IF part, called the

antecedent (premise or condition) and the THEN part
called the consequent (conclusion or action)

IF <antecedent>
THEN <consequent>

§ A rule can have multiple antecedents joined by the

keywords AND (conjunction), OR (disjunction) or
a combination of both.

IF <antecedent 1> IF <antecedent 1>

AND <antecedent 2> OR <antecedent 2>
M M
AND <antecedent n> OR <antecedent n>
THEN <consequent> THEN <consequent>

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B219 Intelligent Systems

§ The antecedent of a rule incorporates two parts: an

object (linguistic object) and its value. The object
and its value are linked by an operator.

§ The operator identifies the object and assigns the

value. Operators such as is, are, is not, are not are
used to assign a symbolic value to a linguistic object.

§ Expert systems can also used mathematical operators

to define an object as numerical and assign it to the
numerical value.

IF ‘age of the customer’ < 18

AND ‘cash withdrawal’ > 1000
THEN ‘signature of the parent’ is required

§ Rules can represent:

• Relation: IF the ‘fuel tank’ is empty THEN the car

is dead

• Recommendation: IF the season is autumn AND

the sky is cloudy AND the forecast is drizzle THEN
the advice is ‘take an umbrella’

• Directive: IF the car is dead AND the ‘fuel tank’ is

empty THEN the action is ‘refuel the car’

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B219 Intelligent Systems

• Strategy: IF the car is dead THEN the action is

‘check the fuel tank’; step1 complete
IF step1 is complete AND the ‘fuel tank’ is full
THEN the action is ‘check the battery’; step2 is
complete

• Heuristic: IF the spill is liquid AND the ‘spill pH’

< 6 AND the ‘spill smell’ is vinegar THEN the
‘spill material’ is ‘acetic acid’

The main players in the development team

§ There are five members of the expert system

development team:
1. domain expert
2. knowledge engineer
3. programmer
4. project manager
5. end-user

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B219 Intelligent Systems

§ Domain Expert:
• is a knowledgeable and skilled person capable of
solving problems in a specific area or domain
• the person’s expertise is to be captured in the
expert system
• could be more than one expert that contribute to an
expert system
• the expert must be able to communicate his or her
knowledge, be willing to participate in the expert
system development and commit a substantial
amount of time to the project
• is the most important person in the expert system
development team

§ Knowledge Engineer:
• is someone who is capable of designing, building
and testing an expert system
• interviews the domain expert to find out how a
particular problem is solved
• establishes what reasoning methods the expert uses
to handle facts and rules and decides how to
represent them in the expert system
• choose some development software or an expert
systems shell, or look at programming languages for
encoding the knowledge
• responsible for testing, revising and integrating the
expert system into the workplace

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B219 Intelligent Systems

§ Programmer:
• is the person responsible for the actual
programming, describing the domain knowledge in
terms that a computer can understand.
• needs to have the skills in symbolic programming in
such AI language such as Prolog.
• should also know conventional programming
language like C, Pascal, FORTRAN and Basic

§ Project Manager:
• is the leader of the expert system development
team, responsible for keeping the project on track
• makes sure that all deliverables and milestones are
met, interacts with the expert, knowledge engineer,
programmer and end-user

§ End-user:
• often called the user
• is a person who uses the expert system when it is
developed
• must not only be confident in the expert system
performance but also feel comfortable using it

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B219 Intelligent Systems

Structure of a rule-based expert system

§ In early 70s, Newell and Simon from Carnegie-

Mellon University proposed a production system
model, the foundation of the modern rule-based
expert systems

§ The production model is based on the idea that

humans solve problems by applying their knowledge
(expressed as production rules) to a given problem
represented by problem-specific information

§ The production rules are stored in the long-term

memory and the problem-specific information or facts
in the short-term memory

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B219 Intelligent Systems

§ Basic Structure of a rule-based expert system

§ Knowledge base contains the domain knowledge

useful for problem solving

§ In rule-based expert system, the knowledge is

represented as a set of rules. Each rule specifies a
relation, recommendation, directive, strategy or
heuristic and has the IF (condition) THEN (action)
structure.

§ When the condition part of a rule is satisfied, the rule

is said to fire and the action part is executed

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B219 Intelligent Systems

§ The database includes a set of facts used to match

against the IF (condition) parts of rules stored in the
knowledge base.

§ The inference engineer carries out the reasoning

whereby the expert system reaches a solution. It links
the rules given in the knowledge base with the facts
provided in the database.

§ The explanation facilities enable the user to ask the

expert system how a particular conclusion is reached
and why a specific fact is needed

§ The user interface is the means of communication

between a user seeking a solution to the problem and
an expert system

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B219 Intelligent Systems

Comparison of expert systems with conventional

systems and human experts

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B219 Intelligent Systems

Conflict Resolution

§ Let us consider two simple rules for crossing a road.

And let us now add the third rule:

§ Rule 1:
IF the ‘traffic light’ is green
THEN the action is go

§ Rule 2:
IF the ‘traffic light’ is red
THEN the action is stop

§ Rule 3:
IF the ‘traffic light’ is red
THEN the action is go

§ We have two rules, Rule 2 and Rule 3, with the same

IF part. Thus both of them can be set to fire when the
condition part is satisfied.

§ These rules represent a conflict set

§ The inference engine must determine which rule to

fire from such a set

§ A method for choosing a rule to fire when more than

one rule can be fired in a given cycle is called conflict
resolution

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B219 Intelligent Systems

Methods used for conflict resolution

§ Fire the rule with the highest priority. In simple

applications, the priority can be established by
placing the rules in an appropriate order in the
knowledge base. Usually this strategy works well for
expert systems with around 100 rules.

§ Fire the most specific rule. This method is also

known as the longest matching strategy. It is based
on the assumption that a specific rule processes more
information than a general one.

§ Fire the rule that uses the data most recently entered
in the database. This method relies on time tags
attached to each fact in the database. In the conflict
set, the expert system first fires the rule whose
antecedent uses the data most recently added to the
database.

Advantages of rule-based expert systems

§ Separation of knowledge from its processing

• The structure of a rule-based expert system provides
an effective separation of the knowledge base from
the inference engine.
• This makes it possible to develop different
applications using the same expert system shell.

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B219 Intelligent Systems

§ Dealing with incomplete and uncertain knowledge

• Most rule-based expert systems are capable of
representing and reasoning with incomplete and
uncertain knowledge.

Disadvantages of rule-based expert systems

§ Opaque relations between rules.

• Although the individual production rules are
relatively simple and self-documented, their logical
interactions within the large set of rules may be
opaque.
• Rule-based systems make it difficult to observe how
individual rules serve the overall strategy.

§ Ineffective search strategy

• The inference engine applies an exhaustive search
through all the production rules during each cycle.
• Expert systems with a large set of rules (over 100
rules) can be slow, and thus large rule-based
systems can be unsuitable for real-time applications

§ Inability to learn
• In general, rule-based expert systems do not have
an ability to learn from the experience.
• Unlike human expert, who knows when to “break
the rules”, an expert system cannot automatically
modify its knowledge base, or adjust existing rules
or add new ones.

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B219 Intelligent Systems

• The knowledge engineer is still responsible for

revising and maintaining the system

Uncertainty Management in Rule-based Expert

Systems

§ Information can be incomplete, inconsistent,

uncertain, or all three.

§ Uncertainty is defined as the lack of the exact

knowledge that would enable us to reach a perfectly
reliable conclusion.

§ Classical logic permits only exact reasoning. Classical

logic permits only exact reasoning. It assumes that
perfect knowledge always exists and the law of the
excluded middle can always be applied:

IF A is true IF A is false
THEN A is not false THEN A is not
true

§ Facts and inferences dealt with so far have been

categorical - either true or false; real life facts and
rules are often less than certain

§ Uncertainty can be expressed numerically as

certainty/confidence factor (cf) or measure of belief
(mb)

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B219 Intelligent Systems

§ cf usually is a real number in a particular range, eg, 0

to 1 or -1 to 1
§ Various schemes have been proposed to deal with
uncertainty

Combining certainties of propositions and rules

Let P1 and P2 be two propositions and cf(P1) and

cf(P2) denote their certainties

Then

cf(P1 and P2) = min(cf(P1), cf(P2))

cf(P1 or P2) = max(cf(P1), cf(P2))

Given the rule

if P1 then P2: cf = C

then certainty of P2 is given by

cf(P2) = cf(P1) * C

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B219 Intelligent Systems

Examples:
if it rains then John will catch a taxi: cf = 0.6
Suppose cf for ‘it rains’ is 0.5,
then cf of ‘John catching a taxi’
= 0.5 * 0.6 = 0.3

if it rains and I forget the umbrella

then I’ll get wet: cf = 0.9

cf of ‘if it rains and I forget the umbrella’

= min(0.7, 0.6)
= 0.6

cf of ‘I’ll get wet’

= cf(if it rains and I forget the umbrella) * 0.9
= 0.6 * 0.9
= 0.54

§ Uncertainty handling schemes such as the one above

are not based on probability theory
§ Difficulty with using probability theory:
1. Difficult for human experts to express likelihood
estimates in terms of probabilities
2. Not all information are available for correct
probabilistic treatment of uncertainties
§ eg, to evaluate certainty of rule
if A or B then C
§ needs probabilities of both A and B, as well as
correlation between occurrences of A and B

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