Changing Viewpoint: Case Indexing by Introspective Questioning

Various cognitive and computational models have addressed the use of previous experience to understand a new domain. In particular, research in case-based reasoning has explored the ideas of retrieving and adapting previous experience in the form of cases, which can only be retrieved when they are appropriately indexed. In contrast to learning new indexes, re-indexing of existing cases has received little attention. The need for re-indexing a case arises when a previous situation has been incorrectly or incompletely understood. We describe a novel approach to re-indexing which integrates results from two different areas: multiple viewpoints used in intelligent tutoring systems and introspective questioning used in metacognitive activities. Furthermore, we apply ideas from Case-Based Reasoning to the re-indexing process itself. The revised index can be tested by active interaction with the agent's environment. An example of our implementation, IULIAN, will illustrate the re-indexing process.