Using Introspective Reasoning to Select Learning Strategies
Michael T. Cox, Ashwin Ram · 1991
In order to learn effectively, a system must not only possess knowledge about the world and be able to improve that knowledge, but it also must introspectively reason about how it performs a given task and what particular pieces of knowledge it needs to improve its performance at the current task. Introspection requires a declarative representation of the reasoning performed by the system during the performance task. This paper presents a taxonomy of possible reasoning failures that can occur during this task, their declarative representations, and their associations with particular learning strategies. We propose a theory of Meta-XPs, which are explanation structures that help the system identify failure types and choose appropriate learning strategies in order to avoid similar mistakes in the future. A program called Meta-AQUA embodies the theory and processes examples in the domain of drug smuggling. Keywords: Introspective learning, metareasoning, explanation patterns. 1 Introducti...