6.871 Reading Summary:  Lecture 10

Due Tuesday, March 14,  9:35am

 

 

Lecture 10:  Summary of Knowledge Representation

 

Please answer the following questions in at most one page.

 

 

Papers:

     Hayes P, The logic of frames

     Shubert L, Semantic nets are in the eye of the beholder

     Davis R, Shrobe H, Szolovits P, What is a Knowledge Representation?

 

1.  We claim that the first two of these papers miss something important about knowledge representation.  They both claim to be critiques of a representation mechanism and both take a kind of reductionist view, claiming that when examined closely, the representation has less than meets the eye.  Both use logic as a kind of testing ground; the Shubert paper has a slightly less narrow field of view.

 

a.       In what way does the reduction to logic prove Hayes’ claim?

b.      What is Hayes’ definition of a representation, and how is this definition linked to his claim?

c.       What elements of the Davis paper does Hayes’ approach ignore?

 

 

2.  The basic argument in the Davis, et. al. paper  is that a knowledge representation performs five important roles and that ignoring any one of them is a bad idea. 

 

a.       What are the five roles?

b.      Pick any representation (e.g. rules, frames, semantic nets, etc.) and describe the roles with respect to that representation.