Title: Asymmetric information measures: how to extract knowledge from an expert so that the expert's effort is minimal

Authors: Hung T. Nguyen, Vladik Kreinovich, Elizabeth Kamoroff

Addresses: Department of Mathematical Sciences, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico 88003, USA. ' Department of Computer Science, University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX 79968, USA. ' Department of Computer Science, University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX 79968, USA

Abstract: Knowledge acquisition is when we ask experts questions, and put the answers into a computer system. Since this is a very time-consuming task, it is desirable to minimise the effort of an expert. As a crude estimate for this effort, we can take a number of binary (yes-no) questions that we ask. The procedure that minimises this number is binary search. This approach does not take into account that people often feel more comfortable answering |yes| than answering |no|. So, to make our estimates more realistic, we will take into consideration that for a negative answer the effort is bigger. This paper describes a procedure that minimises the effort of an expert. We also estimate the effort of this |optimal| search procedure.

Keywords: knowledge acquisition; binary search; expert knowledge; asymmetric information measures; minimal effort.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAAC.2008.022184

International Journal of Automation and Control, 2008 Vol.2 No.2/3, pp.317 - 339

Published online: 22 Dec 2008 *

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