posted on 2000-01-01, 00:00authored byBruce M. McLaren, Kevin D. Ashley
Expert decision-makers often explain decisions by citing
general principles. In some domains, however, it is nearly
impossible to define principles intensionally so that they
may be applied deductively. After investigating hundreds of
professional ethics case opinions, we hypothesized that the
decision-makers’ explanations extensionally defined
principles over time, in effect, operationalizing them. To
model this phenomenon computationally, we constructed
SIROCCO, a system for retrieving principles and past cases.
This paper presents empirical evidence that
operationalization information can be leveraged to predict
relevant principles and past cases more accurately than
competing approaches that do not use such information.