Third edition of Artificial Intelligence: foundations of computational agents, Cambridge University Press, 2023 is now available (including the full text).
5.3.3 Knowledge-Level Explanation
The explicit use of semantics allows explanation and debugging at the knowledge level. To make a system usable by people, the system cannot just give an answer and expect the user to believe it. Consider the case of a system advising doctors who are legally responsible for the treatment that they carry out based on the diagnosis. The doctors must be convinced that the diagnosis is appropriate. The system must be able to justify that its answer is correct. The same features are used to explain how the system found a result and to debug the knowledge base.
Three complementary means of interrogation are used to explain the relevant knowledge: (1) a how question is used to explain how an answer was derived, (2) a why question is used to ask the system why it is asking the user a question, and (3) a whynot question is used to ask why an atom was not able to be proved.
To explain how an answer was derived, a "how" question can be asked by a user when the system has returned the answer. The system provides the definite clause used to deduce the answer. For any atom in the body of the definite clause, the user can ask how the system derived that atom.
The user can ask "why" in response to being asked a question. The system replies by giving the rule that produced the question. The user can then ask why the head of that rule was being proved. Together these rules allow the user to traverse a proof or a partial proof of the top-level query.
A "whynot" question can be used to ask why a particular atom was not able to be proved.
