8 Chapter 1 IntroduCtIon to Knowledge-Based systems
test it. When forming a hypothesis, a large amount of knowledge about the
expected scenes is required.
It has been difficult to build computers that can generate and understand
even fragments of a natural language like English. This is because language
has developed as an effective communication medium between intelligent
beings. It is seen as transmitting a bit of “mental structure” from one brain
to another under circumstances in which each brain possesses large, highly
similar mental structures that provide a common context. This similarity in
context helps in generating and understanding highly condensed messages.
Thus, natural-language understanding is a highly complex process of encod- ...