Representing Definitions And Its Associated Knowledge In A Learning Program

Category allows the abstraction of similar ideas into a single term for easy communication with another person. The similarities may be succinctly captured by a definition. In this paper, we are interested in the implementation of a program to acquire definitions, and use them to answer questions concerning these definitions. Several major components of a definition have been identified and implemented: given, condition, and method. The different subclasses and other associated class hierarchies needed are presented. The methods learned may be used to answer two different kinds of questions, namely the “is” and the “what” questions. The “is” question is to solve the classification problem, whereas the “what” question is to find an answer that satisfies some definition. When answering a question posted by a human, the answer is obtained by executing the appropriate method, with its required arguments collected from the given question. A simple scheme to store and name the methods has been designed to locate effectively the correct method. Our design is done using Object-Oriented paradigms, and the system implemented in C++. 1 This research is based in part upon work supported by the University of Houston Small Grant program under Grant I092371. Representing Definitions and its Associated Knowledge in a Learning Program