SYNTEL(TM): Knowledge Programming Using Functional Representations

Engineering

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 5

Knowledge Representation

SYNTEL is a novel knowledge representation language that provides traditional features of expert system shells within a pure functional programming paradigm. However, it differs sharply from existing functional languages in many ways, ranging from its ability to deal with uncertainty to its evaluation procedures. A very flexible user-interface definition facility is tightly integrated with the SYNTEL interpreter, giving the knowledge engineer full control over both form and content of the end-user system. SYNTEL is fully implemented and has been successfully used to develop large knowledge bases dealing with problems of risk assessment.