Query Answering and Providing Explanations for Decisions
Query answering is the ability to query the agent about things like
past episodes ("Where were you last night?"), or the current state of
the world ("Are your fingernails clean?"). If not posed in natural language, some of these queries are quite
simple if the agent simply has episodic or state information
immediately available. While a number of architecture discussions
omitted query answering, many have general problem-solving ability that could be
applied in this direction.
It is also often desirable that an agent provide explanations of its actions.
For instance, supervisors may
monitor a system's performance, possibly because of the sensitivity of the
domain, in which case the agent must provide justifications of its choices.
More commonly, a system may make mistakes which must be corrected. Because
of the complexity of most architectures, such debugging is difficult, if
not intractable. A trace of the agent's processing, in the form of a
decision explanation, would provide valuable information to the system
designers in trying to amend the situation.
Architectures having this capability include:
Go to A List of Common Capabilities.
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