Visualizing epistemic structures of interrogative domain models

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the concept of epistemic visualization in interrogative domains. Epistemic visualization is the process and result of developing visual models that capture the structure, content, justification and acquisition of knowledge obtained by a software agent in a knowledge-based system. The knowledge is the foundation in which the agent can respond to queries against a corpus containing questions and answers. The visualizations are therefore used to examine the quality of the software agent's knowledge. The visual models will include justification and commitment artifacts as well as knowledge acquisition flow. The visualization will demarcate the a priori and posteriori knowledge. The knowledge of the software agent is stored in epistemic structures which are knowledge representation schemes that supports the basic concepts of knowledge as defined by the tripartite analysis of knowledge. Epistemic visualization is used to analyze the quality of the knowledge of a software agent in an interrogative domain. For our purpose, interrogative domains are hearings, trials, interrogations, personality test or any document source in which the primary content is questions and answers pairs. In this paper, we introduce the Epistemic Structure Es that captures the agent's knowledge and the visualization of that epistemic structure using common visualization techniques.