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From: sriram@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Newsgroups: mod.ai
Subject: Expert Systems and Explanations
Message-ID: <8703051313.AA08018@HERA>
Date: Thu, 5-Mar-87 08:13:33 EST
Article-I.D.: HERA.8703051313.AA08018
Posted: Thu Mar  5 08:13:33 1987
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Knowledge-based system technology is a programming methodology, which
facilitates the incorporation of "human or expert" knowledge. Hence, the
criterion that explanation facilitiy is a must for a knowledge based
system (or an expert system once you add the expert's knowledge) is 
to be questioned.

In fact, our experience with building expert systems indicates that 
the end user is least bothered about seeing things like:

    Rule XX concluded that YY is true. 

That stuff is good for debugging purposes. For the explanations
to be accepted by end users a more robust ENGLISH translation should be
provided (for example Swartout's work). Further,  I feel the selling 
point for any expert system will be the USER INTERFACE (with nice graphics).

Sriram