Page type: project

UT Knowledge-Based Systems Group;Knowledge-Based Systems Group;; Bruce Porter Rich Mallory Peter Clark; Art Souther Fred Prado Charles Callaway; and (not shown above): Carl Andersen, Steve Correl.;Overview;Our group is part of the;Department of Computer Sciences at;Univ. Texas at Austin.;The long-term goal of our research is to develop technology for;constructing and using large, multifunctional knowledge bases on;computers. These knowledge bases would significantly improve current;expert systems and tutoring systems because they contain the broad;knowledge of a domain required to perform multiple tasks and to;explain domain knowledge from multiple viewpoints.;During the past eight years, we have built a large knowledge base in;one area of biology, and developed methods for automatically answering;a variety of questions using the knowledge base. Containing about;180,000 facts concerning 30,000 concepts, our knowledge base is one of;the largest of its kind (i.e. its content is structured and formally;represented). In addition to expanding this knowledge base, we are;also beginning to construct similar knowledge bases in other domains,;most notably, the domain of Distributed Computing.;We are especially encouraged by the results from using our knowledge;base for a variety of AI tasks. Most recently, James Lester used the;biology knowledge base to test his system for explanation generation.;The system generated about 60 explanations, expressed in English,;concerning biological objects and events. In a controlled experiment,;domain experts found little difference between these explanations and;those written by their colleagues.;Currently, we are extending the types of questions that can be;answered using automated reasoning with a large knowledge base. Jeff;Rickel developed a method for "compositional modeling", the task;of constructing a model appropriate for answering a prediction;("what-if") question. Performing this task well requires building the;simplest model that can adequately answer the question - a daunting;requirement since knowledge bases like ours implicitly contain MANY;models at numerous levels of detail. The Qualitative Process Compiler;and QSIM are used to simulate the models built by Jeff's program.;Finally, we are testing the generality of our research results by;building a knowledge base in another domain - distributed computing;environments (focussing on OSF's DCE) - to construct a help-desk;assistant for automatically answering a proportion of customer's;questions which would otherwise be phoned in to a normal help-desk.;Research Projects;Our completed and ongoing research projects include:; KM/KQL; - our knowledge representation language,; KnEd; - the knowledge base editor,; BKB; - the biology knowledge base,; KASTL; - the viewpoint retriever,; KNIGHT; - explanation and text planning,; FARE; - natural language generation of text plans,; LexEd; - computer-aided maintenance for KB lexicons,; TRIPEL; - compositional modeling for answering prediction questions,; Help-Desk Assistant; - the DCE Help-Desk Assistant project.;Researchers; Bruce Porter; (porter@cs.utexas.edu); Rich Mallory; (mallory@cs.utexas.edu); Art Souther; (souther@cs.utexas.edu); Charles Callaway; (theorist@cs.utexas.edu); Fred Prado (prado@cs.utexas.edu); Carl Andersen (searcher@cs.utexas.edu); Steve Correl (correl@cs.utexas.edu);Recent alumni and alumnae:; Liane Acker (acker@austin.ibm.com); Erik Eilerts; (eilerts@cs.utexas.edu); Ray Bareiss (bareiss@ils.nwu.edu); Brad Blumenthal; Karl Branting; (karl@eolus.uwyo.edu); Peter Clark; (clarkp@redwood.rt.cs.boeing.com);; James Lester (lester@adm.csc.ncsu.edu); Ken Murray (murray@cyc.com); Jeff Rickel (rickel@isi.edu);Publications;Click;here to see some selected publications from our group.;Other Related KB Projects;Click here;for an extensive collection of pointers to other KB projects around;the world.;porter@cs.utexas.edu;