Introduction to Knowledge Representation and

Reasoning(KRR)

What is knowledge representation?

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 describe 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
Following are the various 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 declarativesentences.
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 givenbelow:

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.

Example: The following is the simple relational knowledge representation.

Player Weight Age

Player1 65 23

Player2 58 18

Player3 75 24

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 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.
o Example:
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. Representational Accuracy:
KR system should have the ability to represent all kind of required knowledge.
2. Inferential Adequacy:
KR system should have ability to manipulate the representational structures to produce new knowledge
corresponding to existing structure.
3. Inferential Efficiency:
The ability to direct the inferential knowledge mechanism into the most productive directions by storing
appropriate guides.
4. Acquisitional 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 categorised into mainly two logics:

a) Propositional Logics
b) Predicate logics 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.

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 consist 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

Let's take an example of a frame for a book

Slots Filters

Title Artificial Intelligence

Genre Computer Science

Author Peter Norvig

Edition Third Edition

Year 1996

Page 1152
Example 2:

Let's suppose we are taking an entity, Peter. Peter is an engineer as a profession, and his age is 25, he lives in city
London, and the country is England. So following is the frame representation for this:

Slots Filter

Name Peter

Profession Doctor

Age 25

Marital status Single

Weight 78

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.