Expert Systems
MatES: Web-based Forward Chaining Expert System for Maternal Care
Misgna, Haile, Ahmed, Moges, Kumar, Anubhav
The solution to prevent maternal complications are known and preventable by trained health professionals. But in countries like Ethiopia where the patient to physician ratio is 1 doctor to 1000 patients, maternal mortality and morbidity rate is high. To fill the gap of highly trained health professionals, Ethiopia introduced health extension programs. Task shifting to health extension workers (HEWs) contributed in decreasing mortality and morbidity rate in Ethiopia. Knowledge-gap has been one of the major challenges to HEWs. The reasons are trainings are not given in regular manner, there is no midwife, gynecologists or doctors around for consultation, and all guidelines are paper-based which are easily exposed to damage. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a web-based expert system for maternal care. We only targeted the major 10 diseases and complication of maternal health issues seen in Sub-Saharan Africa. The expert system can be accessed through the use of web browsers from computers as well as smart phones. Forward chaining rule-based expert system is used in order to give suggestions and create a new knowledge from the knowledge-base. This expert system can be used to train HEWs in the field of maternal health. Keywords: expert system, maternal care, forward-chaining, rule-based expert system, PHLIPS
Can I Be of Further Assistance? Using Unstructured Knowledge Access to Improve Task-oriented Conversational Modeling
Jin, Di, Kim, Seokhwan, Hakkani-Tur, Dilek
Most prior work on task-oriented dialogue systems are restricted to limited coverage of domain APIs. However, users oftentimes have requests that are out of the scope of these APIs. This work focuses on responding to these beyond-API-coverage user turns by incorporating external, unstructured knowledge sources. Our approach works in a pipelined manner with knowledge-seeking turn detection, knowledge selection, and response generation in sequence. We introduce novel data augmentation methods for the first two steps and demonstrate that the use of information extracted from dialogue context improves the knowledge selection and end-to-end performances. Through experiments, we achieve state-of-the-art performance for both automatic and human evaluation metrics on the DSTC9 Track 1 benchmark dataset, validating the effectiveness of our contributions.
Knowledgeable or Educated Guess? Revisiting Language Models as Knowledge Bases
Cao, Boxi, Lin, Hongyu, Han, Xianpei, Sun, Le, Yan, Lingyong, Liao, Meng, Xue, Tong, Xu, Jin
Previous literatures show that pre-trained masked language models (MLMs) such as BERT can achieve competitive factual knowledge extraction performance on some datasets, indicating that MLMs can potentially be a reliable knowledge source. In this paper, we conduct a rigorous study to explore the underlying predicting mechanisms of MLMs over different extraction paradigms. By investigating the behaviors of MLMs, we find that previous decent performance mainly owes to the biased prompts which overfit dataset artifacts. Furthermore, incorporating illustrative cases and external contexts improve knowledge prediction mainly due to entity type guidance and golden answer leakage. Our findings shed light on the underlying predicting mechanisms of MLMs, and strongly question the previous conclusion that current MLMs can potentially serve as reliable factual knowledge bases.
Mayflower AI sea drone readies maiden transatlantic voyage
Another ship called the Mayflower is set to make its way across the Atlantic Ocean this week, but it won't be carrying English pilgrims -- or any people -- at all. When the Mayflower Autonomous Ship leaves its home port in Plymouth, England to attempt the world's first fully autonomous transatlantic voyage, it will have a highly trained "captain" and a "navigator" versed in the rules of avoiding collisions at sea on board, both controlled by artificial intelligence (AI). The ship's AI captain was developed by Marine AI and is guided by an expert system based on IBM technologies, including automation software widely used by the financial sector. The technology could someday help crewed vessels navigate difficult situations and facilitate low-cost exploration of the oceans that cover 70 percent of the Earth's surface. Over its roughly three-week trip, the Mayflower sea drone will sail through the Isles of Scilly and over the site of the lost Titanic to land in Plymouth, Massachusetts, as the colonists on the first Mayflower did more than 400 years ago.
Institutional Metaphors for Designing Large-Scale Distributed AI versus AI Techniques for Running Institutions
Boer, Alexander, Sileno, Giovanni
Artificial Intelligence (AI) started out with an ambition to reproduce the human mind, but, as the sheer scale of that ambition became manifest, it quickly retreated into either studying specialized intelligent behaviours, or proposing over-arching architectural concepts for interfacing specialized intelligent behaviour components, conceived of as agents in a kind of organization. This agent-based modeling paradigm, in turn, proves to have interesting applications in understanding, simulating, and predicting the behaviour of social and legal structures on an aggregate level. For these reasons, this chapter examines a number of relevant cross-cutting concerns, conceptualizations, modeling problems and design challenges in large-scale distributed Artificial Intelligence, as well as in institutional systems, and identifies potential grounds for novel advances.
What Can Knowledge Bring to Machine Learning? -- A Survey of Low-shot Learning for Structured Data
Hu, Yang, Chapman, Adriane, Wen, Guihua, Hall, Dame Wendy
Supervised machine learning has several drawbacks that make it difficult to use in many situations. Drawbacks include: heavy reliance on massive training data, limited generalizability and poor expressiveness of high-level semantics. Low-shot Learning attempts to address these drawbacks. Low-shot learning allows the model to obtain good predictive power with very little or no training data, where structured knowledge plays a key role as a high-level semantic representation of human. This article will review the fundamental factors of low-shot learning technologies, with a focus on the operation of structured knowledge under different low-shot conditions. We also introduce other techniques relevant to low-shot learning. Finally, we point out the limitations of low-shot learning, the prospects and gaps of industrial applications, and future research directions.
Knowledge Bases Are The Next Big Thing: Here's Why
Almost every organization out there has databases brimming with data dedicated to some project or application. And for some reason, some companies still shy away from it, sticking with the good old spreadsheets. While there's nothing wrong with it fundamentally, oftentimes, some of this siloed information is restricted or simply not accessible to other parts of the organization, for whatever reason. And there's information that's hidden away from your customers -- information that they will need access to either for troubleshooting or for simply starting up. A test conducted by BBC in the UK back in 2009 showed that customers had to wait up to 24 minutes to access customer service of some kind.
SCARI: Separate and Conquer Algorithm for Action Rules and Recommendations Induction
Sikora, Marek, Matyszok, Paweł, Wróbel, Łukasz
This article describes an action rule induction algorithm based on a sequential covering approach. Two variants of the algorithm are presented. The algorithm allows the action rule induction from a source and a target decision class point of view. The application of rule quality measures enables the induction of action rules that meet various quality criteria. The article also presents a method for recommendation induction. The recommendations indicate the actions to be taken to move a given test example, representing the source class, to the target one. The recommendation method is based on a set of induced action rules. The experimental part of the article presents the results of the algorithm operation on sixteen data sets. As a result of the conducted research the Ac-Rules package was made available.
Schema2QA: High-Quality and Low-Cost Q&A Agents for the Structured Web
Xu, Silei, Campagna, Giovanni, Li, Jian, Lam, Monica S.
Building a question-answering agent currently requires large annotated datasets, which are prohibitively expensive. This paper proposes Schema2QA, an open-source toolkit that can generate a Q&A system from a database schema augmented with a few annotations for each field. The key concept is to cover the space of possible compound queries on the database with a large number of in-domain questions synthesized with the help of a corpus of generic query templates. The synthesized data and a small paraphrase set are used to train a novel neural network based on the BERT pretrained model. We use Schema2QA to generate Q&A systems for five Schema.org domains, restaurants, people, movies, books and music, and obtain an overall accuracy between 64% and 75% on crowdsourced questions for these domains. Once annotations and paraphrases are obtained for a Schema.org schema, no additional manual effort is needed to create a Q&A agent for any website that uses the same schema. Furthermore, we demonstrate that learning can be transferred from the restaurant to the hotel domain, obtaining a 64% accuracy on crowdsourced questions with no manual effort. Schema2QA achieves an accuracy of 60% on popular restaurant questions that can be answered using Schema.org. Its performance is comparable to Google Assistant, 7% lower than Siri, and 15% higher than Alexa. It outperforms all these assistants by at least 18% on more complex, long-tail questions.
COINS: Dynamically Generating COntextualized Inference Rules for Narrative Story Completion
Despite recent successes of large pre-trained language models in solving reasoning tasks, their inference capabilities remain opaque. We posit that such models can be made more interpretable by explicitly generating interim inference rules, and using them to guide the generation of task-specific textual outputs. In this paper we present COINS, a recursive inference framework that i) iteratively reads context sentences, ii) dynamically generates contextualized inference rules, encodes them, and iii) uses them to guide task-specific output generation. We apply COINS to a Narrative Story Completion task that asks a model to complete a story with missing sentences, to produce a coherent story with plausible logical connections, causal relationships, and temporal dependencies. By modularizing inference and sentence generation steps in a recurrent model, we aim to make reasoning steps and their effects on next sentence generation transparent. Our automatic and manual evaluations show that the model generates better story sentences than SOTA baselines, especially in terms of coherence. We further demonstrate improved performance over strong pre-trained LMs in generating commonsense inference rules. The recursive nature of COINS holds the potential for controlled generation of longer sequences.