CHAPTER-THREE

KNOWELDGE REPRESENTATION IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLENGENCE

Humans are best at understanding, reasoning, and interpreting knowledge. Human knows things,
which is knowledge and as per their knowledge they perform various actions in the real
world. But how machines do all these things comes under knowledge representation and
reasoning. Hence we can describe Knowledge representation as following:

o Knowledge representation and reasoning (KR, KRR) is the part of Artificial intelligence
which concerned with AI agents thinking and how thinking contributes to intelligent
behavior of agents.
o It is responsible for representing information about the real world so that a computer can
understand and can utilize this knowledge to solve the complex real world problems such
as diagnosis a medical condition or communicating with humans in natural language.
o It is also a way which describes how we can represent knowledge in artificial
intelligence. Knowledge representation is not just storing data into some database, but it
also enables an intelligent machine to learn from that knowledge and experiences so that
it can behave intelligently like a human.

What to Represent:

Following are the kind of knowledge which needs to be represented in AI systems:

o Object: All the facts about objects in our world domain. E.g., Guitars contains strings,
trumpets are brass instruments.
o Events: Events are the actions which occur in our world.

o Performance: It describes behavior which involves knowledge about how to do things.

o Meta-knowledge: It is knowledge about what we know.

o Facts: Facts are the truths about the real world and what we represent.
 o Knowledge-Base: The central component of the knowledge-based agents is the
knowledge base. It is represented as KB. The Knowledgebase is a group of the Sentences
(Here, sentences are used as a technical term and not identical with the English
language).

Knowledge: Knowledge is awareness or familiarity gained by experiences of facts, data, and

situations. Following are the types of knowledge in artificial intelligence:

Types of knowledge

1. Declarative Knowledge:

o Declarative knowledge is to know about something.

o It includes concepts, facts, and objects.

o It is also called descriptive knowledge and expressed in declarative sentences.

o It is simpler than procedural language.

2. Procedural Knowledge

o It is also known as imperative knowledge.

 o Procedural knowledge is a type of knowledge which is responsible for knowing how to
do something.
o It can be directly applied to any task.

o It includes rules, strategies, procedures, agendas, etc.

o Procedural knowledge depends on the task on which it can be applied.

3. Meta-knowledge:

o Knowledge about the other types of knowledge is called Meta-knowledge.

4. Heuristic knowledge:

o Heuristic knowledge is representing knowledge of some experts in a filed or subject.

o Heuristic knowledge is rules of thumb based on previous experiences, awareness of

approaches, and which are good to work but not guaranteed.

5. Structural knowledge:

o Structural knowledge is basic knowledge to problem-solving.

o It describes relationships between various concepts such as kind of, part of, and grouping
of something.
o It describes the relationship that exists between concepts or objects.

The relation between knowledge and intelligence:

Knowledge of real-worlds plays a vital role in intelligence and same for creating artificial
intelligence. Knowledge plays an important role in demonstrating intelligent behavior in AI
agents. An agent is only able to accurately act on some input when he has some knowledge or
experience about that input.

Let's suppose if you met some person who is speaking in a language which you don't know, then
how you will able to act on that. The same thing applies to the intelligent behavior of the agents.
As we can see in below diagram, there is one decision maker which act by sensing the
environment and using knowledge. But if the knowledge part will not present then, it cannot
display intelligent behavior.

AI knowledge cycle:

An Artificial intelligence system has the following components for displaying intelligent
behavior:

o Perception

o Learning

o Knowledge Representation and Reasoning

o Planning

o Execution
The above diagram is showing how an AI system can interact with the real world and what components
help it to show intelligence. AI system has Perception component by which it retrieves information from
its environment. It can be visual, audio or another form of sensory input. The learning component is
responsible for learning from data captured by Perception comportment. In the complete cycle, the main
components are knowledge representation and Reasoning. These two components are involved in
showing the intelligence in machine-like humans. These two components are independent with each other
but also coupled together. The planning and execution depend on analysis of Knowledge representation
and reasoning.

Approaches to knowledge representation:

There are mainly four approaches to knowledge representation, which are given below:

1. Simple relational knowledge:

o It is the simplest way of storing facts which uses the relational method, and each fact about a set
of the object is set out systematically in columns.

o This approach of knowledge representation is famous in database systems where the

relationship between different entities is represented.
o This approach has little opportunity for inference.

2. Inheritable knowledge:
o In the inheritable knowledge approach, all data must be stored into a hierarchy of classes.
o All classes should be arranged in a generalized form or a hierarchal manner.
 o In this approach, we apply inheritance property.
o Elements inherit values from other members of a class.
o
o This approach contains inheritable knowledge which shows a relation between instance and class,
and it is called instance relation.
o Every individual frame can represent the collection of attributes and its value.
o In this approach, objects and values are represented in Boxed nodes.
o We use Arrows which point from objects to their values.

3. Inferential knowledge:
o Inferential knowledge approach represents knowledge in the form of formal logics.
o This approach can be used to derive more facts.
o It guaranteed correctness.
o Example: Let's suppose there are two statements:

a. Marcus is a man

b. All men are mortal

Then it can represent as;
 man(Marcus)
∀x = man (x) ----------> mortal (x)s

4. Procedural knowledge:
o Procedural knowledge approach uses small programs and codes which describes how to do
specific things, and how to proceed.
o In this approach, one important rule is used which is If-Then rule.
o In this knowledge, we can use various coding languages such as LISP language and Prolog
language.

o We can easily represent heuristic or domain-specific knowledge using this approach.

o But it is not necessary that we can represent all cases in this approach.

Requirements for knowledge Representation system:

A good knowledge representation system must possess the following properties.

1. 1. Representational Accuracy:
KR system should have the ability to represent all kind of required knowledge.
2. 2. Inferential Adequacy:
KR system should have ability to manipulate the representational structures to produce new
knowledge corresponding to existing structure.

3. 3. Inferential Efficiency:
The ability to direct the inferential knowledge mechanism into the most productive directions by
storing appropriate guides.
4. 4. Acquisition efficiency- The ability to acquire the new knowledge easily using automatic
methods.

Techniques of knowledge representation

There are mainly four ways of knowledge representation which are given as follows:

1. Logical Representation

2. Semantic Network Representation

 3. Frame Representation
4. Production Rules

1. Logical Representation

Logical representation is a language with some concrete rules which deals with propositions and
has no ambiguity in representation. Logical representation means drawing a conclusion based on
various conditions. This representation lays down some important communication rules. It
consists of precisely defined syntax and semantics which supports the sound inference. Each
sentence can be translated into logics using syntax and semantics.

Syntax:
o Syntaxes are the rules which decide how we can construct legal sentences in the logic.
o It determines which symbol we can use in knowledge representation.
o How to write those symbols.

Semantics:
o Semantics are the rules by which we can interpret the sentence in the logic.
o Semantic also involves assigning a meaning to each sentence.

Logical representation can be categorized into mainly two logics:

 a. Propositional Logics
b. Predicate logics

Note: We will discuss Prepositional Logics and Predicate logics in later chapters.

Advantages of logical representation:

1. Logical representation enables us to do logical reasoning.
2. Logical representation is the basis for the programming languages.

Disadvantages of logical Representation:

1. Logical representations have some restrictions and are challenging to work with.
2. Logical representation technique may not be very natural, and inference may not be so efficient.

Note: Do not be confused with logical representation and logical reasoning as logical representation
is a representation language and reasoning is a process of thinking logically.

2. Semantic Network Representation

Semantic networks are alternative of predicate logic for knowledge representation. In Semantic
networks, we can represent our knowledge in the form of graphical networks. This network
consists of nodes representing objects and arcs which describe the relationship between those
objects. Semantic networks can categorize the object in different forms and can also link those
objects. Semantic networks are easy to understand and can be easily extended.

This representation consists of mainly two types of relations:

a. IS-A relation (Inheritance)

b. Kind-of-relation

Example: Following are some statements which we need to represent in the form of nodes and
arcs.
Statements:
a. Jerry is a cat.
b. Jerry is a mammal
c. Jerry is owned by Priya.

d. Jerry is brown colored.

e. All Mammals are animal.

In the above diagram, we have represented the different type of knowledge in the form of nodes
and arcs. Each object is connected with another object by some relation.

Drawbacks in Semantic representation:

1. Semantic networks take more computational time at runtime as we need to traverse the complete
network tree to answer some questions. It might be possible in the worst case scenario that after
traversing the entire tree, we find that the solution does not exist in this network.
2. Semantic networks try to model human-like memory (Which has 1015 neurons and links) to store
the information, but in practice, it is not possible to build such a vast semantic network.
3. These types of representations are inadequate as they do not have any equivalent quantifier, e.g.,
for all, for some, none, etc.
4. Semantic networks do not have any standard definition for the link names.

5. These networks are not intelligent and depend on the creator of the system.
Advantages of Semantic network:
1. Semantic networks are a natural representation of knowledge.
2. Semantic networks convey meaning in a transparent manner.
3. These networks are simple and easily understandable.

3. Frame Representation

A frame is a record like structure which consists of a collection of attributes and its values to
describe an entity in the world. Frames are the AI data structure which divides knowledge into
substructures by representing stereotypes situations. It consists of a collection of slots and slot
values. These slots may be of any type and sizes. Slots have names and values which are called
facets.

Facets: The various aspects of a slot is known as Facets. Facets are features of frames which
enable us to put constraints on the frames. Example: IF-NEEDED facts are called when data of
any particular slot is needed. A frame may consist of any number of slots, and a slot may include
any number of facets and facets may have any number of values. A frame is also known as slot-
filter knowledge representation in artificial intelligence.

Frames are derived from semantic networks and later evolved into our modern-day classes and
objects. A single frame is not much useful. Frames system consist of a collection of frames
which are connected. In the frame, knowledge about an object or event can be stored together in
the knowledge base. The frame is a type of technology which is widely used in various
applications including Natural language processing and machine visions.

Example: 1 Lets take an example of a frame for a book

Advantages of frame representation:
1. The frame knowledge representation makes the programming easier by grouping the related data.
2. The frame representation is comparably flexible and used by many applications in AI.

3. It is very easy to add slots for new attribute and relations.

4. It is easy to include default data and to search for missing values.

5. Frame representation is easy to understand and visualize.

Disadvantages of frame representation:

1. In frame system inference mechanism is not be easily processed.
2. Inference mechanism cannot be smoothly proceeded by frame representation.

3. Frame representation has a much generalized approach.

4. Production Rules

Production rules system consist of (condition, action) pairs which mean, "If condition then
action". It has mainly three parts:

o The set of production rules

o Working Memory

o The recognize-act-cycle
In production rules agent checks for the condition and if the condition exists then production rule
fires and corresponding action is carried out. The condition part of the rule determines which rule
may be applied to a problem. And the action part carries out the associated problem-solving
steps. This complete process is called a recognize-act cycle.

The working memory contains the description of the current state of problems-solving and rule
can write knowledge to the working memory. This knowledge match and may fire other rules.

If there is a new situation (state) generates, then multiple production rules will be fired together,
this is called conflict set. In this situation, the agent needs to select a rule from these sets, and it
is called a conflict resolution.

Example:
o IF (at bus stop AND bus arrives) THEN action (get into the bus)
o IF (on the bus AND paid AND empty seat) THEN action (sit down).
o IF (on bus AND unpaid) THEN action (pay charges).
o IF (bus arrives at destination) THEN action (get down from the bus).

Advantages of Production rule:

1. The production rules are expressed in natural language.
2. The production rules are highly modular, so we can easily remove, add or modify an individual
rule.

Disadvantages of Production rule:

1. Production rule system does not exhibit any learning capabilities, as it does not store the result of
the problem for the future uses.
2. During the execution of the program, many rules may be active hence rule-based production
systems are inefficient.