Date of Award

Winter 1991

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Computer Science

Committee Director

Stewart N. T. Shen

Committee Member

Larry Wilson

Committee Member

Robert Lucking

Committee Member

Ravi Mukkamala

Abstract

This dissertation presents a diagnosis model, Integration of Abductive and Deductive Inference diagnosis model (IADI), in the light of the cognitive processes of human diagnosticians. In contrast with other diagnosis models, that are based on enumerating, tracking and classifying approaches, the IADI diagnosis model relies on different inferences to solve the diagnosis problems. Studies on a human diagnosticians' process show that a diagnosis process actually is a hypothesizing process followed by a verification process. The IADI diagnosis model integrates abduction and deduction to simulate these processes. The abductive inference captures the plausible features of this hypothesizing process while the deductive inference presents the nature of the verification process. The IADI diagnosis model combines the two inference mechanisms with a structure analysis to form the three steps of diagnosis, mistake detection by structure analysis, misconception hypothesizing by abductive inference, and misconception verification by deductive inference. An intelligent tutoring system, "Recursive Programming Tutor" (RPT), has been designed and developed to teach students the basic concepts of recursive programming. The RPT prototype illustrates the basic features of the IADI diagnosis approach, and also shows a hypertext-based tutoring environment and the tutoring strategies, such as concentrating diagnosis on the key steps of problem solving, organizing explanations by design plans and incorporating the process of tutoring into diagnosis.

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In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

DOI

10.25777/7mcs-q184

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