Language Games: Solving the Vocabulary Problem in Multi-Case-Base Reasoning

The problem of heterogeneous case representation poses a major obstacle to realising real-life multi-case-base CBR systems. The knowledge overhead in developing and maintaining translation protocols between distributed case bases poses a serious challenge to CBR developers. In this paper, we situate CBR as a flexible problem-solving strategy that relies on several heterogeneous knowledge containers. We introduce a technique called language games to solve the interoperability issue. Our technique has two phases. The first is an eager learning phase where case bases communicate to build a shared indexing lexicon of similar cases in the distributed network. The second is the problem-solving phase where, using the distributed index, a case base can quickly consult external case bases if the local solution is insufficient. We provide a detailed description of our approach and demonstrate its effectiveness using an evaluation on a real data set from the tourism domain