Donald A. Waterman

Explanation for an expert system that performs estate planning

EPS (Estate Planning System) is a prototype expert system that performs testamentary estate planning by interacting directly with clients or paralegal professionals. The current result of a consultation between a client and EPS is the clients will, printed by a form generating program that EPS accesses. The system is written in ROSIE (Kipps, et al.. 1986) and uses the XPL explanation facility (Waterman, et al., 1986) to help generate and manipulate explanations about estate planning. Although ROSIE is strictly rule-based and procedure-oriented, EPS represents ita estate planning concepts in a simple frame system implemented especially for EPS in INTERLISP and ROSIE. EPS operates on a Xerox 1100 series workstation and has reached the stage of a demonstration prototype, containing approximately 100 rules and frames. Our development of EPS follows the traditional expert systems approach. including explanation of system operation for the end-user. What makes it a bit different is that the end-user is not necessarily knowledgeable about the domain. This means that the system not only has to explain what it has done, but also has to educate the user about the domain. This education is not as extensive as that required in true tutoring situations, such as those found in CA1 applications. (Compare Clancey, 1984.) Still, it is more extensive than that required by typical expert systems designed for very knowledgeable end-users. We feel EPS should be able to interact directly with clients (possibly with the assistance of trained paralegals) to create their estate plans for two major reasons. First, this avoids the expense of having an attorney create the plan. Second, this could increase the quality of estate plans being provided since many estate plans are created by attorneys who are general practitioners and lack sufficient estate planning expertise. Thus, in designing EPS a substantial amount of effort was required to insure that the program could explain estate planning to an unsophisticated user.

The applications of artificial intelligence to law: a survey of six current projects

The literature on computer-based consultation systems has often suggested the possibility of building an expert system in the field of law, but it is only recently that several researchers have begun to explore this possibility seriously. For this session, we have assembled summaries of six major projects on the applications of artificial intelligence to legal problem domains, and we have invited representatives of these six projects to participate in a panel discussion of their work.

EP-2, A prototype Exemplary Programming system

This report describes the design and implementation of the Exemplary Programming (EP) system that allows software to be created by example. The EP paradigm is as follows: The user performs some interactive task on a computer. The EP system watches over the users shoulder, recording the interaction between the user and the system he is using. When the task is done, EP constructs an algorithm or high-level model of the interaction. Part of this construction may involve questions to the user or advice from the user. EP then constructs a program (agent) from the model and stores it in a library for subsequent use. A critique and suggestions for the next version of the EP system are included.