Task-structures, knowledge acquisition and learning

Abstract

One of the old saws about learning in AI is that an agent can only learn what it can be told, i.e., the agent has to have a vocabulary for the target structure which is to be acquired by learning. What this vocabulary is, for various tasks, is an issue that is common to whether one is building a knowledge system by learning or by other more direct forms of knowledge acquisition. I long have argued that both the forms of declarative knowledge required for problem solving as well as problem-solving strategies are functions of the problem-solving task and have identified a family of generic tasks that can be used as building blocks for the construction of knowledge systems. In this editorial, I discuss the implication of this line of research for knowledge acquisition and learning.