END-USER MANIPULATION OF A KNOWLEDGE-BASED SYSTEM - A STUDY OF AN EXPERTS PRACTICE

The advent of end-user manipulation of knowledge-based systems (EUKMS) provides new opportunities for addressing the problems of encapsulating domain expertise. Interfaces which enable the expert, a professional and/or scientific practitioner, to create, refine and evaluate rules about the constituent elements of their knowledge provide a means of circumventing some of the current barriers to successful knowledge encapsulation. The critical feature of the design of such systems is the provision of facilities for the automatic conversion of the expert's rules into code. In a study of scientific work involving the capture of phonetics expertise in a knowledge-based system, key aspects of a speech scientist's working practice were identified. This paper discusses that use of the Speech Knowledge Interface system (SKI) in the context of investigations into the construction of an enhanced model of speech production for a speaker independent, continuous speech recognizer. Evidence that providing the expert with an appropriate interface to a knowledge-based system stimulates questions about existing knowledge and gives rise to new insights into the scope of the investigations, was found. Thus, the process of knowledge externalization, both of knowledge which was only partially realized and knowledge that was perceived as "new" by the expert, was facilitated by the interaction with the system. © 1993 Academic Press. All rights reserved.