Knowledge Representation

Module -II

Programme: B. Tech-IT,
Course: Artificial Intelligence (CSE401)
Faculty: Dr. Seema Rawat
 Index

• Introduction to Knowledge Representation

• Types of Knowledge
• Issues in Knowledge Representation
 Learning Objective

To gain the insight about a knowledge representation techniques

in the area of AI

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Knowledge

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 Knowledge Representation
• A knowledge representation is a study of ways of how knowledge is actually
represented and how effectively it resembles the representation of knowledge
inhuman brain.

• A knowledge representation system should provide ways of representing complex

knowledge.

• How to represent the knowledge in a machine?

• The Language is needed to represent the knowledge . There must be a method to

use this knowledge.

• Syntax and semantic must be well defined in order to represent the language.
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 Knowledge Representation

• To solve problems in artificial intelligence requires large amount of knowledge and some
mechanism that knowledge to create solutions to new problem. A variety of knowledge
facts have been exploited in AI programs. Hence we are dealing with two different kinds
of entities such as:

• Facts: - It is truth in some relevant world. These are the things we want to represent.

• Representations of facts in some chosen formalism: - These are the things we will
actually be able to manipulate.
 Presentation of Knowledge
So that one way to think of structuring these entities is as two levels:-
The knowledge level: - In this facts are described.
The symbol level: - In this we can give representations of object at the knowledge level
are defined in terms of symbol that can be manipulated by programs.

Fig: Mapping between Facts and Representations

 Presentation of Knowledge
• Consider the English sentence: Luka is a dog.
• The fact represented by that English sentence can be represented in logic as: dog
(Luka)

• We also have logical representations of fact that: All dogs have tails
• V x: dog (x) has tail (x)
• Hence we can deduce this representation: has tail (Luka)

• So that using backward mapping we can represent or generate the English sentence:
Luka has a tail
Knowledge Representation Framework

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 Characteristics of Knowledge Representation

• The representation scheme should have a set of well-defined syntax

and semantic. This will help in representing various kinds of
knowledge.

• The knowledge representation scheme should have a good expressive

capacity. It will catalyze the inference mechanism in its reasoning
process.

• From the computer system point of view, the representation must be

efficient.

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Types of Knowledge

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Types of Knowledge

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Types of Knowledge

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Types of Knowledge

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 Issues in Knowledge Representation
• The fundamental goal of Knowledge Representation is to facilitate
inferencing (conclusions) from knowledge.

• The issues that arise while using KR techniques are many. Some of
these are below:
• Important Attributes
• Relationship among attributes
• Choosing Granularity
• Set of objects
• Finding Right structure
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 Issues in Knowledge Representation

Important Attributes :
• Any attribute of objects so basic that they occur in almost every problem domain ?
Relationship among attributes:
• Any important relationship that exists among object attributes ?
Choosing Granularity :
• At what level of detail should the knowledge be represented ?
Set of objects :
• How sets of objects be represented ?
Finding Right structure :
• Given a large amount of knowledge stored, how can relevant parts be accessed ?

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Fig: Inheritable Knowledge representation [1]
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 Important Attributed

• Any attribute of objects so basic that they occur in almost every

problem domain?

• There are two attributed “instance” and “isa”, that are general
significance. These attributes are important because they support
property inheritance.

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 Relationship among Attributes

• The attributes to describe objects are themselves entities they

represent.

• The relationship between the attributes of an object, independent of

specific knowledge they encode, may hold properties like:

• Inverses, existence in an isa hierarchy, techniques for reasoning about

values and single valued attributes.

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 Relationship among Attributes
Inverses :
This is about consistency check, while a value is added to one attribute.
The entities are related to each other in many different ways.

Existence in an "isa" hierarchy :

This is about generalization-specialization, like, classes of objects and
specialized subsets of those classes.

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 Relationship among Attributes

Techniques for reasoning about values :

• This is about reasoning values of attributes not given explicitly. Several kinds of
information are used in reasoning, like,
• height : must be in a unit of length,
• age : of person can not be greater than the age of person's parents.

Single valued attributes :

• This is about a specific attribute that is guaranteed to take a unique value.
• Example : A baseball player can at time have only a single height and be a member
of only one team.
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 Choosing Granularity

While deciding the granularity of representation, it is necessary to

know the following:

• i. What are the primitives and at what level should the knowledge be
represented?
• ii. What should be the number (small or large) of low-level primitives
or high-level facts?

High-level facts may be insufficient to draw the conclusion while Low-

level primitives may require a lot of storage.
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 Choosing Granularity
For example: Suppose that we are interested in following facts:
Ram spotted Shyam.
Now, this could be represented as "Spotted (agent(Ram), object
(Shyam))“
Such a representation can make it easy to answer questions such as:
Who spotted Shyam?
Suppose we want to know : "Did Ram see Sukhvinder?"
Given only one fact, user cannot discover that answer.

Hence, the user can add other facts, such as "Spotted (x, y) → saw (x,
y)"
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 Set of objects

The reason to represent sets of objects is :

• If a property is true for all or most elements of a set, then it is more
efficient to associate it once with the set
• rather than to associate it explicitly with every elements of the set .

Example: assert large (elephant);

• Remember to make clear distinction between, whether we are
asserting some property of the set itself,
• means, the set of elephants is large, or
• asserting some property that holds for individual elements of the
set , means, any thing that is an elephant is large. 26
 Finding Right Structure
• Given a large amount of knowledge stored in a database, how can
relevant parts are accessed when they are needed?
• This is about access to right structure for describing a particular
situation.

While doing so, it is necessary to solve following problems:

• How to perform an initial selection of the most appropriate structure.
• How to fill in appropriate details from the current situations.
• How to find a better structure if the one chosen initially turns out not
to be appropriate.
• What to do if none of the available structures is appropriate.
• When to create and remember a new structure. 27
 Reference

[1] https://www.tutorialride.com

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 Bibliography

[1] Artificial Intelligence (2nd ed) by Elaine Rich and Kevin

Knight, McGraw Hill (1991). ISBN 0-07-100894-2

[2] Dan W. Patterson, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and

Expert Systems- Prentice Hall of India.

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Thank You

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