A Logical Representation for Relevance Criteria*

Kevin D. Ashley and Vincent Aleven

University of Pittsburgh
Intelligent Systems Program,
Learning Research and Development Center, and
School of Law,
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15260


Abstract. As CBR system designers confront the problem of building programs 
that can explain their results, a logical representation of relevance
concepts will be useful. Our application, tutoring students to reason with
cases, necessitated adopting a declarative, logical representation of case-based 
relevance concepts. Representing relevance criteria in first-order logic
with LOOM has turned out not to be prohibitively expensive computationally 
and has had considerable advantages: it facilitates the use of multiple,
changing relevance criteria involving complex relationships among cases, we
have made some progress in enabling a program to explain aspects of its relevance 
criteria by example, and even students are beginning to express their
own queries in a simplified version of the language for CATO, our tutoring
program, to interpret.
References

[ Aleven and Ashley, 1992] Vincent Aleven and Kevin D. Ashley. Automated Generation
of Examples for a Tutorial in Case-Based Argumentation. In C. Frasson, G. Gauthier,
and G.I. McCalla, editors, Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Intelligent 
Tutoring Systems, pages 576584, Montreal, 1992.
[Aleven and Ashley, 1994] Vincent Aleven and Kevin D. Ashley. An Instructional Environment 
for Practidng Argumentation Skills. 1994. To appear in Proceedings AAAI-94.
[Ashley and Aleven, 1992] Kevin D. Ashley and Vincent Aleven. Generating Dialectical
Examples Automatically. In Proceedings AAAI92. July 1992. San Jose, CA.
[Ashley and Rissland, 1988] Kevin D. Ashley and Edwina L. Rissland. Waiting on
Weighting: A Symbolic Least Commitment Approach. In Proceedings AAAI88. August 1988. St. Paul.
[Ashley, 1990] Kevin D. Ashley. Modeling Legal Argument: Reasoning with Cases and
Hypotheticals. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1990. Based on Ashleys 1987 PhD. Dissertation,
University of Massachusetts, COINS Technical Report No. 8801.
[Ashley, 1993] Kevin D. Ashley. Case-Based Reasoning and its Implications for Legal
Expert Systems. Artificial Intelligence and Law, 1(2), 1993.
[ Barr and Feigenbaum, 1981] Avron Barr and Edward Feigenbaum, editors. Logic, volume 
1. William Kaufmann, Los Altos, CA, 1981.
[Branting, 1991] L. Karl Branting. Building Explanations from Rules and Structured
Cases. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 34(6):797837, 1991.
[Gardner, 1987] A. vdL. Gardner. An Artificial Intelligence Approach to Legal Reasoning.
MIT Press, Cambridge, 1987.
[Golding and Rosenbloom, 1991] Andrew R. Golding and Paul S. Rosenbloom. Improving
Rule-Based Systems through Case-Based Reasoning. In Proceedings AAAI91, pages
2227. July 1991. Anaheim, CA.
[Kass et al., 1986] A. M. Kass, D. Leake, and C. C. Owens. Swale: A Program that Explains. 
In Roger C. Schanck, editor, Explanation Patterns: Understanding Mechanically
and Creatively. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ, 1986.
[Koton, 1988] Phyllis Koton. Using Experience in Learning and Problem Solving. PhD
thesis, MIT, 1988.
[MacGregor, 1991] Robert MacGregor. The Evolving Technology of Classification-Based
Knowledge Representation Systems. In John F. Sowa, editor, Principles of Semantic
Networks: Explorations in the Representation of Knowledge, pages 385400. Morgan
Kaufmann, San Mateo, CA, 1991.
[Mitchell et al., 1991] Tom M. Mitchell, John Allen, Prasad Chalasani, John Cheng, Oren
Etzioni, Marc Ringuette, and Jeffrey C. Schllmmer. Theo: A Framework for Self-
Improving Systems. In Kurt VanLehn, editor, Architectures for Intelligence, pages 323
355. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ, 1991.
[Rissland and Skalak, 1991] Edwina L. Rissland and David B. Skalak. CABARET: Statutory 
Interpretation in a Hybrid Architecture. International Journal of Man-Machine
Studies, 34(6):839887, 1991.
[Sergot et al., 1986] M. J. Sergot, F. Sadri, R. A. Kowalski, F. Kriwaczek, P. Hammond,
and H. T. Cory. The British Nationality Act as a Logic Program. Communications of
the ACM, 29(5):370386, May 1986.
[Sycara, 1987] Katia Sycara. Resolving Adversarial Conflicts: An Approach Integrating
Case-Based and Analytic Methods. PhD thesis, Georgia Institute of Technology, 1987.
School of Information and Computer Science, Technical Report No. 87-26.
[Veloso, 1992] Manuela M. Veloso. Learning by Analogical Reasoning in General Problem
Solving. PhD thesis, Carnegie Mellon University, 1992. Technical Report No. CMU-CS-
92-174.
