temp

User-drive dialog will typically provide information in a form that cannot be
incorporated directly to the KB. This is because 1) it may introduce
inconsistencies by conflicting with previous information, 2) it may be
incomplete or underspecified at intermediate points during the dialog 3) it
may need further elaboration and testing to ensure that they will make
appropriate addition to the KB. 


Knowledge Testing and Debugging
 
We will develop software technology to help debug new information as it is added t
o a large knowledge base.  
With current approaches to knowledge acquisition and engineering, the consequences
 of adding new information are
 hidden from inspection until the information is used for question answering. 
 Our approach will exercise new information, immediately after it is entered, by p
erforming a variety of
 automated tasks, such as text generation.  Furthermore, our approach will search 
for relationships
 between the new information and the existing knowledge to find
contradictions, su pport structures, and useful indices
 
Problem solving methods for BW capabilities assessment 
 
We will create and use a significant body of reusable middle-level theories to rep
resent and guide the acquisition of 
assessment problem solving knowledge.  In past work, we have developed middle-leve
l theories for evaluation and
 critiquing those capture general principles about how to analyze a plan.  We
will
 extend and use these theories to include
 assessment knowledge for production plans that takes into account the context
of the situation.  The acquisition of new knowledge from the user about BW
capabilities assessment wi ll be guided by having the user
 extend those general principles with domain-specific knowledge.