Expert: Chuck Cosby - 2/18/2005

Question
Dear Chuck Cosby,

Can you explain what Knowledge Base is? Is there a working model?

I am studying AI by books, I don't take master degree to study AI (I can't afford it :) ). I am interested in knowledge base (KB). Can you guide me on how to learn AI by autodidact? What do I need to learn KB? I am a C++ programmer, is it enough to start?

Thank you

Frans Indroyono

Answer
A KB is just a database that stores words, phrases, sentence structures, ect - It the repository of all the information needed to process natural language sentences or voice commands, etc.  Being a C++ programmer is perfect, don't waste your time with prolog, lisp and those other so called 'AI' languages.  (If anything - focus on .Net).  I'm not very good at recomeneding how to learn it, as I invented everything I do over a 30 year period of research.  I'm sure there are endless books, don't be taken in by the typical focus on 'Grammer' based parsers.  Even Microsoft has recently realized the error of using English grammer or the grammer of any other language.  Mainly because different langugages all have different grammer!  I recomend a 'Concept Matrx' approach.  This is were you build a matrix of concepts for a specific domain - such as 'Airline reservation conversations'  The concept matrix is all the concepts (language independent) about the subject matter being mapped.  This is also what goes into the KB -all the concpets and their relationship and all the words and phrases and how they might 'map' to the concepts.  Processing is of coarse the real trick.  You take an input sentence, parse out the words, look them up in the KB, map them to concepts in the matrix, then deduce the meaning of the sentence! Its that simple!  It's actually so nightmarishly complex that no one has ever really been able to make it work.  Good luck!