Procedural Knowledge

Basic idea:

• Knowledge encoded in some procedures
  • small programs that know how to do specific things, how to proceed.
  • e.g a parser in a natural language understander has the knowledge that a noun phrase may contain articles, adjectives and nouns. It is represented by calls to routines that know how to process articles, adjectives and nouns.

Advantages:

• Heuristic or domain specific knowledge can be represented.
• Extended logical inferences, such as default reasoning facilitated.
• Side effects of actions may be modelled. Some rules may become false in time. Keeping track of this in large systems may be tricky.

Disadvantages:

• Completeness - not all cases may be represented.
• Consistency - not all deductions may be correct.

  e.g If we know that Fred is a bird we might deduce that Fred can fly. Later we might discover that Fred is an emu.

• Modularity is sacrificed. Changes in knowledge base might have far-reaching effects.
• Cumbersome control information.