Personal Construct Theory and the Transfer of Human Expertise

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 4

Expert Systems

The bottleneck in the process of building expert svstems is retrieving the appropriate problem-solving knowledge from the human expert. Methods of knowledge elicitation and analysis from psychotherapy based on enhancements to George Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory are applied to this process. The Expertise Transfer System is described which interviews a human expert and then constructs and analyzes the knowledge that the expert uses to solve his particular problem. The first version of the system elicits the initial knowledge needed to solve analysis problems without the intervention of a knowledge engineering team. Fast (two hour) initial prototyping of expert systems which run on KS- 300 (an extended version of EMYCIN) and OPS5 is also performed. Conflicts in the problem-solving methods of the expert may also be enumerated and explored.