Knowledge acquisition tools based on personal construct psychology

Abstract

Knowledge acquisition research supports the generation of knowledge-based systems through the development of principles, techniques, methodologies and tools. What differentiates knowledge-based system development from conventional system development is the emphasis on in-depth understanding and formalization of the relations between the conceptual structures underlying expert performance and the computational structures capable of emulating that performance.Personal construct psychology is a theory of individual and group psychological and social processes that has been used extensively in knowledge acquisition research to model the cognitive processes of human experts. The psychology takes a constructivist position appropriate to the modelling of human knowledge processes, but develops this through the characterization of human conceptual structures in axiomatic terms that translate directly to computational form. In particular, there is a close correspondence between the intensional logics of knowledge, belief and action developed in personal construct psychology, and the intensional logics for formal knowledge representation developed in artificial intelligence research as term subsumption, or KL-ONE-like, systems.This paper gives an overview of personal construct psychology and its expression as an intensional logic describing the cognitive processes of anticipatory agents, and uses this to survey knowledge acquisition tools deriving from personal construct psychology.

Experts and Decision Making: First Steps towards a Unifying Theory of Decision Making in Novices, Intermediates and Experts

“…To investigate the proposed hypotheses empirically, a number of methods might be necessary. For instance, to understand which information is searched for and used on different levels of expertise, a nonreactive method like Active Information Search (Huber, 2007;Huber & Huber, 2008;Huber, Wider, & Huber, 1997) or Eye Tracking (e.g., Pomplun, Richter, & Velichkovsky, 1996) might be useful; to make the chunks of experts accessible free recall (e.g., Chi, 2006b;Hoffman, 1987;Hoffman, Shadbolt, Burton & Klein, 1995) as an established method in memory research could be useful; and to get a first glimpse at the underlying mental representation, methods for the elicitation and explication of knowledge (e.g., Gaines & Shaw, 1993) could be employed. We intend to use a combination of these methods in forthcoming research.…”

Incorporating tutoring principles into interactive knowledge acquisition

“…KSSn ---KSSn (Gaines and Shaw, 1993) is a family of knowledge editors based on personal construct psychology that enables end users to specify conceptual structures. Through a graphical editor, users can specify a graph of concepts, roles, constraints, and rules that the system then translates into a formal representation.…”

“…KSSn (Gaines and Shaw, 1993) To acquire concepts, rules, and data. Based on personal construct psychology.…”

“…Other systems focus on detecting errors in the knowledge specified by the user (Gil and Melz, 1996;McGuinness et al, 2000;Kim and Gil, 1999). Some systems use a variety of elicitation techniques to acquire descriptive knowledge (Gaines and Shaw, 1993;Clark et al, 2001;Shadbolt and Burton, 1989) often in semi-formal forms. There are some isolated reports of users with no formal background in computer science that are now able to use acquisition systems to build sizeable knowledge bases (Kim and Gil, 2000;Clark et al, 2001).…”

Concept development for future domains: A new method of knowledge elicitation

“…Tacit knowledge, which has been learned implicitly through experience, and overlearned automatic procedural knowledge can often be difficult for experts to express. Indirect methods constrain the experts to state their knowledge with the help of predefined structures such as, repertory grids (Kelly, 1955;Gaines & Shaw, 1992), decision trees, card sorting (Geiwitz, Kornell, & McCloskey, 1990;Major, 1991), and laddering techniques (Geiwitz, et al, 1990;Rugg, Mcgeorge, & Shadbolt, 1990;Cordingley, 1989). It is worth noting, however, that direct methods such as CDM have also been used successfully to elicit tacit knowledge.…”