Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Explanation plays an important role in acquiring knowledge, solving problems, and establishing the credibility of conclusions. One approach to gaining explanatory competence is to acquire proofs of the domain inference rules used during problem solving. Acquiring proofs enables a system to strengthen an imperfect theory by connecting unexplained rules to the underlying principles and tacit assumptions that justify their use. This paper formalizes the task of improving explanatory competence through acquiring proofs of domain inference rules and describes KI, a knowledge acquisition tool that discovers proofs of rules as it integrates new information into a knowledge base. KI's learning method includes techniques for controlling the search for proofs and evaluating multiple explanations of a proposition to determine when they cim be transformed into proofs of domain inference rules.