Abstract

In order to learn effectively, a reasoner 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 declarative representations of meta-knowledge of the reasoning performed by the system during the performance task, of the system's knowledge, and of the organization of this knowledge. This paper presents a taxonomy of possible reasoning failures that can occur during a performance task, declarative representations of these failures, and associations between failures and particular learning strategies. The theory is based on Meta-XPs, which are explanation structures that help the system identify failure types, formulate learning goals, and choose appropriate learning strategies in order to avoid similar mistakes in the future. The theory is implemented in a ...

Citations