p-95-01

Representing Self-Knowledge for Introspection about Memory Search

David Leake

Proceedings of the 1995 AAAI Spring Symposium on Representing
Mental States and Mechanisms.  Invited position paper. In press. 

This position paper sketches a framework for modeling introspective
reasoning and discusses the relevance of that framework for modeling
introspective reasoning about memory search.  It argues that effective
and flexible memory processing in rich memories should be built on
five types of explicitly represented self-knowledge: knowledge about
information needs, relationships between different types of
information, expectations for the actual behavior of the information
search process, desires for its ideal behavior, and representations of
how those expectations and desires relate to its actual performance.
This approach to modeling memory search is both an illustration of
general principles for modeling introspective reasoning and a step
towards addressing the problem of how a reasoner---human or
machine---can acquire knowledge about the properties of its own
knowledge base.


A postscript file for the full paper is available electronically.  
To get a copy
  by anonymous ftp, see  ftp://ftp.cs.indiana.edu/pub/leake/README.
  on the web, open URL   ftp://ftp.cs.indiana.edu/pub/leake/INDEX.html.