Rapid Argumentation Capture from Analysis Reports: The Case Study of Aum Shinrikyo

The availability of subject matter experts has always been a challenge for the development of knowledge-based cognitive assistants incorporating their expertise. This paper presents an approach to rapidly develop cognitive assistants for evidence-based reasoning by capturing and operationalizing the expertise that was already documented in analysis reports. It illustrates the approach with the development of a cognitive assistant for assessing whether a terrorist organization is pursuing weapons of mass destruction, based on a report on the strategies followed by Aum Shinrikyo to develop and use biological and chemical weapons. Knowledge engineering, learning agent shell for evidence-based reasoning, problem reduction and solution synthesis, agent teaching and learning, intelligence analysis, cognitive assitant, argumentation, weapons of mass destruction.