Adversarial Search

Adversarial search is a search, where we examine the problem which arises when we try to
plan ahead of the world and other agents are planning against us.
o In previous topics, we have studied the search strategies which are only associated with
a single agent that aims to find the solution which often expressed in the form of a
sequence of actions.
o But, there might be some situations where more than one agent is searching for the
solution in the same search space, and this situation usually occurs in game playing.
o The environment with more than one agent is termed as multi-agent environment, in
which each agent is an opponent of other agent and playing against each other. Each
agent needs to consider the action of other agent and effect of that action on their
performance.
o So, Searches in which two or more players with conflicting goals are trying to explore
the same search space for the solution, are called adversarial searches, often known as
Games.
o Games are modeled as a Search problem and heuristic evaluation function, and these
are the two main factors which help to model and solve games in AI.
Types of Games in AI:

Deterministic Chance Moves

Perfect information Chess, Checkers, go, Othello Backgammon, monopoly

Imperfect information Battleships, blind, tic-tac-toe Bridge, poker, scrabble, nuclear war
o Perfect information: A game with the perfect information is that in which agents can look
into the complete board. Agents have all the information about the game, and they can
see each other moves also. Examples are Chess, Checkers, Go, etc.
o Imperfect information: If in a game agents do not have all information about the game
and not aware with what's going on, such type of games are called the game with
imperfect information, such as tic-tac-toe, Battleship, blind, Bridge, etc.
o Deterministic games: Deterministic games are those games which follow a strict pattern
and set of rules for the games, and there is no randomness associated with them.
Examples are chess, Checkers, Go, tic-tac-toe, etc.
 o Non-deterministic games: Non-deterministic are those games which have various
unpredictable events and has a factor of chance or luck. This factor of chance or luck is
introduced by either dice or cards. These are random, and each action response is not
fixed. Such games are also called as stochastic games.
Example: Backgammon, Monopoly, Poker, etc.
Zero-Sum Game
o Zero-sum games are adversarial search which involves pure competition.
o In Zero-sum game each agent's gain or loss of utility is exactly balanced by the losses or
gains of utility of another agent.
o One player of the game try to maximize one single value, while other player tries to
minimize it.
o Each move by one player in the game is called as ply.
o Chess and tic-tac-toe are examples of a Zero-sum game.
Zero-sum game: Embedded thinking
The Zero-sum game involved embedded thinking in which one agent or player is trying to figure
out:
o What to do.
o How to decide the move
o Needs to think about his opponent as well
o The opponent also thinks what to do
Each of the players is trying to find out the response of his opponent to their actions. This
requires embedded thinking or backward reasoning to solve the game problems in AI.
Formalization of the problem:
A game can be defined as a type of search in AI which can be formalized of the following
elements:
o Initial state: It specifies how the game is set up at the start.
o Player(s): It specifies which player has moved in the state space.
o Action(s): It returns the set of legal moves in state space.
o Result(s, a): It is the transition model, which specifies the result of moves in the state
space.
o Terminal-Test(s): Terminal test is true if the game is over, else it is false at any case. The
state where the game ends is called terminal states.
o Utility(s, p): A utility function gives the final numeric value for a game that ends in
terminal states s for player p. It is also called payoff function. For Chess, the outcomes
are a win, loss, or draw and its payoff values are +1, 0, ½. And for tic-tac-toe, utility
values are +1, -1, and 0.

Game tree:

A game tree is a tree where nodes of the tree are the game states and Edges of the tree are the
moves by players. Game tree involves initial state, actions function, and result Function.
Example: Tic-Tac-Toe game tree:

The following figure is showing part of the game-tree for tic-tac-toe game. Following are some
key points of the game:

o There are two players MAX and MIN.

o Players have an alternate turn and start with MAX.
o MAX maximizes the result of the game tree
o MIN minimizes the result.

Example Explanation:

o From the initial state, MAX has 9 possible moves as he starts first. MAX place x and MIN
place o, and both player plays alternatively until we reach a leaf node where one player
has three in a row or all squares are filled.
o Both players will compute each node, minimax, the minimax value which is the best
achievable utility against an optimal adversary.
o Suppose both the players are well aware of the tic-tac-toe and playing the best play.
Each player is doing his best to prevent another one from winning. MIN is acting against
Max in the game.
o So in the game tree, we have a layer of Max, a layer of MIN, and each layer is called
as Ply. Max place x, then MIN puts o to prevent Max from winning, and this game continues
until the terminal node.
o In this either MIN wins, MAX wins, or it's a draw. This game-tree is the whole search
space of possibilities that MIN and MAX are playing tic-tac-toe and taking turns
alternately.
 Hence adversarial Search for the minimax procedure works as follows:

o It aims to find the optimal strategy for MAX to win the game.
o It follows the approach of Depth-first search.
o In the game tree, optimal leaf node could appear at any depth of the tree.
o Propagate the minimax values up to the tree until the terminal node discovered.

In a given game tree, the optimal strategy can be determined from the minimax value of each
node, which can be written as MINIMAX(n). MAX prefer to move to a state of maximum value
and MIN prefer to move to a state of minimum value then:

Mini-Max Algorithm in Artificial Intelligence

o Mini-max algorithm is a recursive or backtracking algorithm which is used in
decision-making and game theory. It provides an optimal move for the player assuming
that opponent is also playing optimally.
o Mini-Max algorithm uses recursion to search through the game-tree.
o Min-Max algorithm is mostly used for game playing in AI. Such as Chess, Checkers,
tic-tac-toe, go, and various tow-players game. This Algorithm computes the minimax
decision for the current state.
o In this algorithm two players play the game, one is called MAX and other is called MIN.
o Both the players fight it as the opponent player gets the minimum benefit while they get
the maximum benefit.
o Both Players of the game are opponent of each other, where MAX will select the
maximized value and MIN will select the minimized value.
o The minimax algorithm performs a depth-first search algorithm for the exploration of the
complete game tree.
o The minimax algorithm proceeds all the way down to the terminal node of the tree, then
backtrack the tree as the recursion.

Pseudo-code for MinMax Algorithm:

1. function minimax(node, depth, maximizingPlayer) is
2. if depth ==0 or node is a terminal node then
3. return static evaluation of node
4.
5. if MaximizingPlayer then // for Maximizer Player
6. maxEva= -infinity
7. for each child of node do
8. eva= minimax(child, depth-1, false)
9. maxEva= max(maxEva,eva) //gives Maximum of the values
10. return maxEva
11.
12. else // for Minimizer player
13. minEva= +infinity
14. for each child of node do
15. eva= minimax(child, depth-1, true)
16. minEva= min(minEva, eva) //gives minimum of the values
17. return minEva

Initial call:

Minimax(node, 3, true)

Working of Min-Max Algorithm:

o The working of the minimax algorithm can be easily described using an example. Below
we have taken an example of game-tree which is representing the two-player game.
o In this example, there are two players one is called Maximizer and other is called
Minimizer.
o Maximizer will try to get the Maximum possible score, and Minimizer will try to get the
minimum possible score.
o This algorithm applies DFS, so in this game-tree, we have to go all the way through the
leaves to reach the terminal nodes.
o At the terminal node, the terminal values are given so we will compare those value and
backtrack the tree until the initial state occurs. Following are the main steps involved in
solving the two-player game tree:
Step-1: In the first step, the algorithm generates the entire game-tree and apply the utility
function to get the utility values for the terminal states. In the below tree diagram, let's take A is
the initial state of the tree. Suppose maximizer takes first turn which has worst-case initial value
=- infinity, and minimizer will take next turn which has worst-case initial value = +infinity.
Step 2: Now, first we find the utilities value for the Maximizer, its initial value is -∞, so we will
compare each value in terminal state with initial value of Maximizer and determines the higher
nodes values. It will find the maximum among the all.
o For node D max(-1,- -∞) => max(-1,4)= 4
o For Node E max(2, -∞) => max(2, 6)= 6
o For Node F max(-3, -∞) => max(-3,-5) = -3
o For node G max(0, -∞) = max(0, 7) = 7

Step 3: In the next step, it's a turn for minimizer, so it will compare all nodes value with +∞, and
will find the 3rd layer node values.
o For node B= min(4,6) = 4
o For node C= min (-3, 7) = -3
Step 4: Now it's a turn for Maximizer, and it will again choose the maximum of all nodes value
and find the maximum value for the root node. In this game tree, there are only 4 layers, hence
we reach immediately to the root node, but in real games, there will be more than 4 layers.
o For node A max(4, -3)= 4

That was the complete workflow of the minimax two player game.
Properties of Mini-Max algorithm:
o Complete- Min-Max algorithm is Complete. It will definitely find a solution (if exist), in
the finite search tree.
o Optimal- Min-Max algorithm is optimal if both opponents are playing optimally.
o Time complexity- As it performs DFS for the game-tree, so the time complexity of
Min-Max algorithm is O(bm), where b is branching factor of the game-tree, and m is the
maximum depth of the tree.
o Space Complexity- Space complexity of Mini-max algorithm is also similar to DFS which
is O(bm).
 Limitation of the minimax Algorithm:
The main drawback of the minimax algorithm is that it gets really slow for complex games such
as Chess, go, etc. This type of games has a huge branching factor, and the player has lots of
choices to decide. This limitation of the minimax algorithm can be improved from alpha-beta
pruning which we have discussed in the next topic.

Alpha-Beta Pruning

o Alpha-beta pruning is a modified version of the minimax algorithm. It is an optimization

technique for the minimax algorithm.
o As we have seen in the minimax search algorithm that the number of game states it has
to examine are exponential in depth of the tree. Since we cannot eliminate the exponent,
but we can cut it to half. Hence there is a technique by which without checking each
node of the game tree we can compute the correct minimax decision, and this technique
is called pruning. This involves two threshold parameter Alpha and beta for future
expansion, so it is called alpha-beta pruning. It is also called as Alpha-Beta Algorithm.
o Alpha-beta pruning can be applied at any depth of a tree, and sometimes it not only
prune the tree leaves but also entire sub-tree.
o The two-parameter can be defined as:

a. Alpha: The best (highest-value) choice we have found so far at any point along
the path of Maximizer. The initial value of alpha is -∞.
a. Beta: The best (lowest-value) choice we have found so far at any point along the
path of Minimizer. The initial value of beta is +∞.
​ he Alpha-beta pruning to a standard minimax algorithm returns the same move as the
T
standard algorithm does, but it removes all the nodes which are not really affecting the final
decision but making algorithm slow. Hence by pruning these nodes, it makes the algorithm fast.

Condition for Alpha-beta pruning:

The main condition which required for alpha-beta pruning is:

1. α>=β

Key points about alpha-beta pruning:

 o The Max player will only update the value of alpha.
o The Min player will only update the value of beta.
o While backtracking the tree, the node values will be passed to upper nodes instead of
values of alpha and beta.
o We will only pass the alpha, beta values to the child nodes.

Pseudo-code for Alpha-beta Pruning:

1. function minimax(node, depth, alpha, beta, maximizingPlayer) is

2. if depth ==0 or node is a terminal node then
3. return static evaluation of node
4.
5. if MaximizingPlayer then // for Maximizer Player
6. maxEva= -infinity
7. for each child of node do
8. eva= minimax(child, depth-1, alpha, beta, False)
9. maxEva= max(maxEva, eva)
10. alpha= max(alpha, maxEva)
11. if beta<=alpha
12. break
13. return maxEva
14.
15. else // for Minimizer player
16. minEva= +infinity
17. for each child of node do
18. eva= minimax(child, depth-1, alpha, beta, true)
19. minEva= min(minEva, eva)
20. beta= min(beta, eva)
21. if beta<=alpha
22. break
23. return minEva

Working of Alpha-Beta Pruning:

Let's take an example of two-player search tree to understand the working of Alpha-beta
pruning

Step 1: At the first step the, Max player will start first move from node A where α= -∞ and β= +∞,
these value of alpha and beta passed down to node B where again α= -∞ and β= +∞, and Node
B passes the same value to its child D.
Step 2: At Node D, the value of α will be calculated as its turn for Max. The value of α is
compared with firstly 2 and then 3, and the max (2, 3) = 3 will be the value of α at node D and
node value will also 3.

Step 3: Now algorithm backtrack to node B, where the value of β will change as this is a turn of
Min, Now β= +∞, will compare with the available subsequent nodes value, i.e. min (∞, 3) = 3,
hence at node B now α= -∞, and β= 3.

In the next step, algorithm traverse the next successor of Node B which is node E, and the
values of α= -∞, and β= 3 will also be passed.

Step 4: At node E, Max will take its turn, and the value of alpha will change. The current value of
alpha will be compared with 5, so max (-∞, 5) = 5, hence at node E α= 5 and β= 3, where α>=β,
so the right successor of E will be pruned, and algorithm will not traverse it, and the value at
node E will be 5.
Step 5: At next step, algorithm again backtrack the tree, from node B to node A. At node A, the
value of alpha will be changed the maximum available value is 3 as max (-∞, 3)= 3, and β= +∞,
these two values now passes to right successor of A which is Node C.

At node C, α=3 and β= +∞, and the same values will be passed on to node F.

Step 6: At node F, again the value of α will be compared with left child which is 0, and
max(3,0)= 3, and then compared with right child which is 1, and max(3,1)= 3 still α remains 3, but
the node value of F will become 1.

Step 7: Node F returns the node value 1 to node C, at C α= 3 and β= +∞, here the value of beta
will be changed, it will compare with 1 so min (∞, 1) = 1. Now at C, α=3 and β= 1, and again it
satisfies the condition α>=β, so the next child of C which is G will be pruned, and the algorithm
will not compute the entire sub-tree G.
Step 8: C now returns the value of 1 to A here the best value for A is max (3, 1) = 3. Following is
the final game tree which is the showing the nodes which are computed and nodes which has
never computed. Hence the optimal value for the maximizer is 3 for this example.

Move Ordering in Alpha-Beta pruning:

The effectiveness of alpha-beta pruning is highly dependent on the order in which each node is
examined. Move order is an important aspect of alpha-beta pruning.

It can be of two types:

o Worst ordering: In some cases, alpha-beta pruning algorithm does not prune any of the
leaves of the tree, and works exactly as minimax algorithm. In this case, it also consumes
more time because of alpha-beta factors, such a move of pruning is called worst
 ordering. In this case, the best move occurs on the right side of the tree. The time
complexity for such an order is O(bm).
o Ideal ordering: The ideal ordering for alpha-beta pruning occurs when lots of pruning
happens in the tree, and best moves occur at the left side of the tree. We apply DFS
hence it first search left of the tree and go deep twice as minimax algorithm in the same
amount of time. Complexity in ideal ordering is O(bm/2).
Rules to find good ordering:
Following are some rules to find good ordering in alpha-beta pruning:
o Occur the best move from the shallowest node.
o Order the nodes in the tree such that the best nodes are checked first.
o Use domain knowledge while finding the best move. Ex: for Chess, try order: captures
first, then threats, then forward moves, backward moves.
o We can bookkeep the states, as there is a possibility that states may repeat.

What is NLP?
NLP stands for Natural Language Processing, which is a part of Computer Science, Human
language, and Artificial Intelligence. It is the technology that is used by machines to understand,
analyse, manipulate, and interpret human's languages. It helps developers to organize
knowledge for performing tasks such as translation, automatic summarization, Named Entity
Recognition (NER), speech recognition, relationship extraction, and topic segmentation.

History of NLP
(1940-1960) - Focused on Machine Translation (MT)
The Natural Languages Processing started in the year 1940s.

1948 - In the Year 1948, the first recognisable NLP application was introduced in Birkbeck
College, London.

1950s - In the Year 1950s, there was a conflicting view between linguistics and computer
science. Now, Chomsky developed his first book syntactic structures and claimed that language
is generative in nature.

In 1957, Chomsky also introduced the idea of Generative Grammar, which is rule based
descriptions of syntactic structures.

(1960-1980) - Flavored with Artificial Intelligence (AI)

In the year 1960 to 1980, the key developments were:

Augmented Transition Networks (ATN)

Augmented Transition Networks is a finite state machine that is capable of recognizing regular
languages.

Case Grammar

Case Grammar was developed by Linguist Charles J. Fillmore in the year 1968. Case Grammar
uses languages such as English to express the relationship between nouns and verbs by using
the preposition.

In Case Grammar, case roles can be defined to link certain kinds of verbs and objects.

For example: "Neha broke the mirror with the hammer". In this example case grammar identify
Neha as an agent, mirror as a theme, and hammer as an instrument.

In the year 1960 to 1980, key systems were:

SHRDLU

SHRDLU is a program written by Terry Winograd in 1968-70. It helps users to communicate

with the computer and moving objects. It can handle instructions such as "pick up the green
boll" and also answer the questions like "What is inside the black box." The main importance of
SHRDLU is that it shows those syntax, semantics, and reasoning about the world that can be
combined to produce a system that understands a natural language.

LUNAR

LUNAR is the classic example of a Natural Language database interface system that is used
ATNs and Woods' Procedural Semantics. It was capable of translating elaborate natural
language expressions into database queries and handle 78% of requests without errors.

1980 - Current
Till the year 1980, natural language processing systems were based on complex sets of
hand-written rules. After 1980, NLP introduced machine learning algorithms for language
processing.

In the beginning of the year 1990s, NLP started growing faster and achieved good process
accuracy, especially in English Grammar. In 1990 also, an electronic text introduced, which
provided a good resource for training and examining natural language programs. Other factors
may include the availability of computers with fast CPUs and more memory. The major factor
behind the advancement of natural language processing was the Internet.

Now, modern NLP consists of various applications, like speech recognition, machine
translation, and machine text reading. When we combine all these applications then it allows
the artificial intelligence to gain knowledge of the world. Let's consider the example of AMAZON
ALEXA, using this robot you can ask the question to Alexa, and it will reply to you.

Advantages of NLP
o NLP helps users to ask questions about any subject and get a direct response within
seconds.
o NLP offers exact answers to the question means it does not offer unnecessary and
unwanted information.
o NLP helps computers to communicate with humans in their languages.
o It is very time efficient.
o Most of the companies use NLP to improve the efficiency of documentation processes,
accuracy of documentation, and identify the information from large databases.

Disadvantages of NLP
A list of disadvantages of NLP is given below:

o NLP may not show context.

o NLP is unpredictable
o NLP may require more keystrokes.
o NLP is unable to adapt to the new domain, and it has a limited function that's why NLP is
built for a single and specific task only.

Components of NLP
There are the following two components of NLP -

1. Natural Language Understanding (NLU)

Natural Language Understanding (NLU) helps the machine to understand and analyse human
language by extracting the metadata from content such as concepts, entities, keywords,
emotion, relations, and semantic roles.

NLU mainly used in Business applications to understand the customer's problem in both spoken
and written language.

NLU involves the following tasks -

o It is used to map the given input into useful representation.

o It is used to analyze different aspects of the language.

2. Natural Language Generation (NLG)

Natural Language Generation (NLG) acts as a translator that converts the computerized data into
natural language representation. It mainly involves Text planning, Sentence planning, and Text
Realization.

Note: The NLU is difficult than NLG.

Difference between NLU and NLG

NLU NLG

NLU is the process of reading and NLG is the process of writing or generating
interpreting language. language.

It produces non-linguistic outputs from It produces constructing natural language outputs

natural language inputs. from non-linguistic inputs.

Applications of NLP
There are the following applications of NLP -

1. Question Answering

Question Answering focuses on building systems that automatically answer the questions asked
by humans in a natural language.
2. Spam Detection

Spam detection is used to detect unwanted e-mails getting to a user's inbox.

3. Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment Analysis is also known as opinion mining. It is used on the web to analyse the
attitude, behaviour, and emotional state of the sender. This application is implemented through
a combination of NLP (Natural Language Processing) and statistics by assigning the values to the
text (positive, negative, or natural), identify the mood of the context (happy, sad, angry, etc.)
4. Machine Translation

Machine translation is used to translate text or speech from one natural language to another
natural language.

Example: Google Translator

5. Spelling correction

Microsoft Corporation provides word processor software like MS-word, PowerPoint for the
spelling correction.
6. Speech Recognition

Speech recognition is used for converting spoken words into text. It is used in applications, such
as mobile, home automation, video recovery, dictating to Microsoft Word, voice biometrics,
voice user interface, and so on.

7. Chatbot

Implementing the Chatbot is one of the important applications of NLP. It is used by many
companies to provide the customer's chat services.

8. Information extraction

Information extraction is one of the most important applications of NLP. It is used for extracting
structured information from unstructured or semi-structured machine-readable documents.

9. Natural Language Understanding (NLU)

It converts a large set of text into more formal representations such as first-order logic
structures that are easier for the computer programs to manipulate notations of the natural
language processing.

How to build an NLP pipeline

There are the following steps to build an NLP pipeline -

Step1: Sentence Segmentation

Sentence Segment is the first step for building the NLP pipeline. It breaks the paragraph into
separate sentences.

Example: Consider the following paragraph -

Independence Day is one of the important festivals for every Indian citizen. It is celebrated on
the 15th of August each year ever since India got independence from the British rule. The day
celebrates independence in the true sense.

Sentence Segment produces the following result:

1. "Independence Day is one of the important festivals for every Indian citizen."
2. "It is celebrated on the 15th of August each year ever since India got independence from
the British rule."
3. "This day celebrates independence in the true sense."

Step2: Word Tokenization

Word Tokenizer is used to break the sentence into separate words or tokens.

Example:

JavaTpoint offers Corporate Training, Summer Training, Online Training, and Winter Training.

Word Tokenizer generates the following result:

"JavaTpoint", "offers", "Corporate", "Training", "Summer", "Training", "Online", "Training", "and",

"Winter", "Training", "."

Step3: Stemming

Stemming is used to normalize words into its base form or root form. For example, celebrates,
celebrated and celebrating, all these words are originated with a single root word "celebrate."
The big problem with stemming is that sometimes it produces the root word which may not
have any meaning.
For Example, intelligence, intelligent, and intelligently, all these words are originated with a
single root word "intelligen." In English, the word "intelligen" do not have any meaning.

Step 4: Lemmatization

Lemmatization is quite similar to the Stamming. It is used to group different inflected forms of
the word, called Lemma. The main difference between Stemming and lemmatization is that it
produces the root word, which has a meaning.

For example: In lemmatization, the words intelligence, intelligent, and intelligently has a root
word intelligent, which has a meaning.

Step 5: Identifying Stop Words

In English, there are a lot of words that appear very frequently like "is", "and", "the", and "a". NLP
pipelines will flag these words as stop words. Stop words might be filtered out before doing any
statistical analysis.

Example: He is a good boy.

Note: When you are building a rock band search engine, then you do not ignore the word "The."

Step 6: Dependency Parsing

Dependency Parsing is used to find that how all the words in the sentence are related to each
other.

Step 7: POS tags

POS stands for parts of speech, which includes Noun, verb, adverb, and Adjective. It indicates
that how a word functions with its meaning as well as grammatically within the sentences. A
word has one or more parts of speech based on the context in which it is used.

Example: "Google" something on the Internet.

In the above example, Google is used as a verb, although it is a proper noun.

Step 8: Named Entity Recognition (NER)

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is the process of detecting the named entity such as person
name, movie name, organization name, or location.

Example: Steve Jobs introduced iPhone at the Macworld Conference in San Francisco,
California.

Step 9: Chunking

Chunking is used to collect the individual piece of information and grouping them into bigger
pieces of sentences.
Phases of NLP
There are the following five phases of NLP:

1. Lexical Analysis and Morphological

The first phase of NLP is the Lexical Analysis. This phase scans the source code as a stream of
characters and converts it into meaningful lexemes. It divides the whole text into paragraphs,
sentences, and words.

2. Syntactic Analysis (Parsing)

Syntactic Analysis is used to check grammar, word arrangements, and shows the relationship
among the words.

Example: Agra goes to the Poonam

In the real world, Agra goes to the Poonam, does not make any sense, so this sentence is
rejected by the Syntactic analyzer.

3. Semantic Analysis

Semantic analysis is concerned with the meaning representation. It mainly focuses on the literal
meaning of words, phrases, and sentences.

4. Discourse Integration

Discourse Integration depends upon the sentences that proceeds it and also invokes the
meaning of the sentences that follow it.

5. Pragmatic Analysis

Pragmatic is the fifth and last phase of NLP. It helps you to discover the intended effect by
applying a set of rules that characterize cooperative dialogues.

For Example: "Open the door" is interpreted as a request instead of an order.

Why NLP is difficult?

NLP is difficult because Ambiguity and Uncertainty exist in the language.

Ambiguity

There are the following three ambiguity -

o Lexical Ambiguity

Lexical Ambiguity exists in the presence of two or more possible meanings of the sentence
within a single word.

Example:

Manya is looking for a match.

In the above example, the word match refers to that either Manya is looking for a partner or
Manya is looking for a match. (Cricket or other match)

o Syntactic Ambiguity

Syntactic Ambiguity exists in the presence of two or more possible meanings within the
sentence.

Example:
I saw the girl with the binocular.

In the above example, did I have the binoculars? Or did the girl have the binoculars?

o Referential Ambiguity

Referential Ambiguity exists when you are referring to something using the pronoun.

Example: Kiran went to Sunita. She said, "I am hungry."

In the above sentence, you do not know that who is hungry, either Kiran or Sunita.

NLP APIs
Natural Language Processing APIs allow developers to integrate human-to-machine
communications and complete several useful tasks such as speech recognition, chatbots,
spelling correction, sentiment analysis, etc.

A list of NLP APIs is given below:

o IBM Watson API

IBM Watson API combines different sophisticated machine learning techniques to enable
developers to classify text into various custom categories. It supports multiple
languages, such as English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese, etc. With the help of IBM
Watson API, you can extract insights from texts, add automation in workflows, enhance
search, and understand the sentiment. The main advantage of this API is that it is very
easy to use.
Pricing: Firstly, it offers a free 30 days trial IBM cloud account. You can also opt for its
paid plans.
o Chatbot API
Chatbot API allows you to create intelligent chatbots for any service. It supports Unicode
characters, classifies text, multiple languages, etc. It is very easy to use. It helps you to
create a chatbot for your web applications.
Pricing: Chatbot API is free for 150 requests per month. You can also opt for its paid
version, which starts from $100 to $5,000 per month.
o Speech to text API
Speech to text API is used to convert speech to text
Pricing: Speech to text API is free for converting 60 minutes per month. Its paid version
starts form $500 to $1,500 per month.
o Sentiment Analysis API
Sentiment Analysis API is also called as 'opinion mining' which is used to identify the
tone of a user (positive, negative, or neutral)
 Pricing: Sentiment Analysis API is free for less than 500 requests per month. Its paid
version starts form $19 to $99 per month.
o Translation API by SYSTRAN
The Translation API by SYSTRAN is used to translate the text from the source language to
the target language. You can use its NLP APIs for language detection, text segmentation,
named entity recognition, tokenization, and many other tasks.
Pricing: This API is available for free. But for commercial users, you need to use its paid
version.
o Text Analysis API by AYLIEN
Text Analysis API by AYLIEN is used to derive meaning and insights from the textual
content. It is available for both free as well as paid from$119 per month. It is easy to use.
Pricing: This API is available free for 1,000 hits per day. You can also use its paid version,
which starts from $199 to S1, 399 per month.
o Cloud NLP API
The Cloud NLP API is used to improve the capabilities of the application using natural
language processing technology. It allows you to carry various natural language
processing functions like sentiment analysis and language detection. It is easy to use.
Pricing: Cloud NLP API is available for free.
o Google Cloud Natural Language API
Google Cloud Natural Language API allows you to extract beneficial insights from
unstructured text. This API allows you to perform entity recognition, sentiment analysis,
content classification, and syntax analysis in more the 700 predefined categories. It also
allows you to perform text analysis in multiple languages such as English, French,
Chinese, and German.
Pricing: After performing entity analysis for 5,000 to 10,000,000 units, you need to pay
$1.00 per 1000 units per month.

NLP Libraries
Scikit-learn: It provides a wide range of algorithms for building machine learning models in
Python.

Natural language Toolkit (NLTK): NLTK is a complete toolkit for all NLP techniques.

Pattern: It is a web mining module for NLP and machine learning.

TextBlob: It provides an easy interface to learn basic NLP tasks like sentiment analysis, noun
phrase extraction, or pos-tagging.

Quepy: Quepy is used to transform natural language questions into queries in a database query
language.
SpaCy: SpaCy is an open-source NLP library which is used for Data Extraction, Data Analysis,
Sentiment Analysis, and Text Summarization.

Gensim: Gensim works with large datasets and processes data streams.

Difference between Natural language and Computer

Language

Natural Language Computer Language

Natural language has a very large Computer language has a very limited vocabulary.
vocabulary.

Natural language is easily understood by Computer language is easily understood by the

humans. machines.

Natural language is ambiguous in nature. Computer language is unambiguous.

What is an Expert System?

An expert system is a computer program that is designed to solve complex problems and to
provide decision-making ability like a human expert. It performs this by extracting knowledge
from its knowledge base using the reasoning and inference rules according to the user queries.

The expert system is a part of AI, and the first ES was developed in the year 1970, which was
the first successful approach of artificial intelligence. It solves the most complex issue as an
expert by extracting the knowledge stored in its knowledge base. The system helps in decision
making for compsex problems using both facts and heuristics like a human expert. It is called so
because it contains the expert knowledge of a specific domain and can solve any complex
problem of that particular domain. These systems are designed for a specific domain, such
as medicine, science, etc.

The performance of an expert system is based on the expert's knowledge stored in its
knowledge base. The more knowledge stored in the KB, the more that system improves its
performance. One of the common examples of an ES is a suggestion of spelling errors while
typing in the Google search box.

Below is the block diagram that represents the working of an expert system:
Note: It is important to remember that an expert system is not used to replace the human
experts; instead, it is used to assist the human in making a complex decision. These systems do
not have human capabilities of thinking and work on the basis of the knowledge base of the
particular domain.

Below are some popular examples of the Expert System:

o DENDRAL: It was an artificial intelligence project that was made as a chemical analysis
expert system. It was used in organic chemistry to detect unknown organic molecules
with the help of their mass spectra and knowledge base of chemistry.
o MYCIN: It was one of the earliest backward chaining expert systems that was designed
to find the bacteria causing infections like bacteraemia and meningitis. It was also used
for the recommendation of antibiotics and the diagnosis of blood clotting diseases.
o PXDES: It is an expert system that is used to determine the type and level of lung cancer.
To determine the disease, it takes a picture from the upper body, which looks like the
shadow. This shadow identifies the type and degree of harm.
o CaDeT: The CaDet expert system is a diagnostic support system that can detect cancer
at early stages.

Characteristics of Expert System

o High Performance: The expert system provides high performance for solving any type of
complex problem of a specific domain with high efficiency and accuracy.
o Understandable: It responds in a way that can be easily understandable by the user. It
can take input in human language and provides the output in the same way.
o Reliable: It is much reliable for generating an efficient and accurate output.
o Highly responsive: ES provides the result for any complex query within a very short
period of time.
Components of Expert System
An expert system mainly consists of three components:

o User Interface
o Inference Engine
o Knowledge Base

1. User Interface

With the help of a user interface, the expert system interacts with the user, takes queries as an
input in a readable format, and passes it to the inference engine. After getting the response from
the inference engine, it displays the output to the user. In other words, it is an interface that
helps a non-expert user to communicate with the expert system to find a solution.

2. Inference Engine(Rules of Engine)

o The inference engine is known as the brain of the expert system as it is the main
processing unit of the system. It applies inference rules to the knowledge base to derive
a conclusion or deduce new information. It helps in deriving an error-free solution of
queries asked by the user.
o With the help of an inference engine, the system extracts the knowledge from the
knowledge base.
o There are two types of inference engine:
o Deterministic Inference engine: The conclusions drawn from this type of inference
engine are assumed to be true. It is based on facts and rules.
 o Probabilistic Inference engine: This type of inference engine contains uncertainty in
conclusions, and based on the probability.

Inference engine uses the below modes to derive the solutions:

o Forward Chaining: It starts from the known facts and rules, and applies the inference
rules to add their conclusion to the known facts.
o Backward Chaining: It is a backward reasoning method that starts from the goal and
works backward to prove the known facts.

3. Knowledge Base

o The knowledgebase is a type of storage that stores knowledge acquired from the
different experts of the particular domain. It is considered as big storage of knowledge.
The more the knowledge base, the more precise will be the Expert System.
o It is similar to a database that contains information and rules of a particular domain or
subject.
o One can also view the knowledge base as collections of objects and their attributes.
Such as a Lion is an object and its attributes are it is a mammal, it is not a domestic
animal, etc.

Components of Knowledge Base

o Factual Knowledge: The knowledge which is based on facts and accepted by knowledge
engineers comes under factual knowledge.
o Heuristic Knowledge: This knowledge is based on practice, the ability to guess,
evaluation, and experiences.

Knowledge Representation: It is used to formalize the knowledge stored in the knowledge base
using the If-else rules.

Knowledge Acquisitions: It is the process of extracting, organizing, and structuring the domain
knowledge, specifying the rules to acquire the knowledge from various experts, and store that
knowledge into the knowledge base.

Development of Expert System

Here, we will explain the working of an expert system by taking an example of MYCIN ES.
Below are some steps to build an MYCIN:

o Firstly, ES should be fed with expert knowledge. In the case of MYCIN, human experts
specialized in the medical field of bacterial infection, provide information about the
causes, symptoms, and other knowledge in that domain.
 o The KB of the MYCIN is updated successfully. In order to test it, the doctor provides a
new problem to it. The problem is to identify the presence of the bacteria by inputting
the details of a patient, including the symptoms, current condition, and medical history.
o The ES will need a questionnaire to be filled by the patient to know the general
information about the patient, such as gender, age, etc.
o Now the system has collected all the information, so it will find the solution for the
problem by applying if-then rules using the inference engine and using the facts stored
within the KB.
o In the end, it will provide a response to the patient by using the user interface.

Participants in the development of Expert System

There are three primary participants in the building of Expert System:

1. Expert: The success of an ES much depends on the knowledge provided by human

experts. These experts are those persons who are specialized in that specific domain.
2. Knowledge Engineer: Knowledge engineer is the person who gathers the knowledge
from the domain experts and then codifies that knowledge to the system according to
the formalism.
3. End-User: This is a particular person or a group of people who may not be experts, and
working on the expert system needs the solution or advice for his queries, which are
complex.

Why Expert System?

Before using any technology, we must have an idea about why to use that technology and
hence the same for the ES. Although we have human experts in every field, then what is the
need to develop a computer-based system. So below are the points that are describing the
need of the ES:

1. No memory Limitations: It can store as much data as required and can memorize it at the
time of its application. But for human experts, there are some limitations to memorize all
things at every time.
2. High Efficiency: If the knowledge base is updated with the correct knowledge, then it
provides a highly efficient output, which may not be possible for a human.
3. Expertise in a domain: There are lots of human experts in each domain, and they all have
different skills, different experiences, and different skills, so it is not easy to get a final
output for the query. But if we put the knowledge gained from human experts into the
expert system, then it provides an efficient output by mixing all the facts and knowledge
4. Not affected by emotions: These systems are not affected by human emotions such as
fatigue, anger, depression, anxiety, etc.. Hence the performance remains constant.
5. High security: These systems provide high security to resolve any query.
6. Considers all the facts: To respond to any query, it checks and considers all the available
facts and provides the result accordingly. But it is possible that a human expert may not
consider some facts due to any reason.
 7. Regular updates improve the performance: If there is an issue in the result provided by
the expert systems, we can improve the performance of the system by updating the
knowledge base.

Capabilities of the Expert System

Below are some capabilities of an Expert System:

o Advising: It is capable of advising the human being for the query of any domain from the
particular ES.
o Provide decision-making capabilities: It provides the capability of decision making in any
domain, such as for making any financial decision, decisions in medical science, etc.
o Demonstrate a device: It is capable of demonstrating any new products such as its
features, specifications, how to use that product, etc.
o Problem-solving: It has problem-solving capabilities.
o Explaining a problem: It is also capable of providing a detailed description of an input
problem.
o Interpreting the input: It is capable of interpreting the input given by the user.
o Predicting results: It can be used for the prediction of a result.
o Diagnosis: An ES designed for the medical field is capable of diagnosing a disease
without using multiple components as it already contains various inbuilt medical tools.

Advantages of Expert System

o These systems are highly reproducible.
o They can be used for risky places where the human presence is not safe.
o Error possibilities are less if the KB contains correct knowledge.
o The performance of these systems remains steady as it is not affected by emotions,
tension, or fatigue.
o They provide a very high speed to respond to a particular query.

Limitations of Expert System

o The response of the expert system may get wrong if the knowledge base contains the
wrong information.
o Like a human being, it cannot produce a creative output for different scenarios.
o Its maintenance and development costs are very high.
o Knowledge acquisition for designing is much difficult.
o For each domain, we require a specific ES, which is one of the big limitations.
o It cannot learn from itself and hence requires manual updates.
Applications of Expert System
o In designing and manufacturing domain
It can be broadly used for designing and manufacturing physical devices such as camera
lenses and automobiles.
o In the knowledge domain
These systems are primarily used for publishing the relevant knowledge to the users. The
two popular ES used for this domain is an advisor and a tax advisor.
o In the finance domain
In the finance industries, it is used to detect any type of possible fraud, suspicious
activity, and advise bankers that if they should provide loans for business or not.
o In the diagnosis and troubleshooting of devices
In medical diagnosis, the ES system is used, and it was the first area where these
systems were used.
o Planning and Scheduling
The expert systems can also be used for planning and scheduling some particular tasks
for achieving the goal of that task.

Goal Stack Planning for Blocks World Problem

Implementing Goal Stack Planning for the given configuration of

Blocks World Problem

Blocks World Problem — Initial State and Goal State for this article

In this medium article, we will take look at the Blocks World Problem and
implement Goal Stack Planning to solve the same.
What is Blocks World Problem?

This is how the problem goes — There is a table on which some blocks are
placed. Some blocks may or may not be stacked on other blocks. We have a
robot arm to pick up or put down the blocks. The robot arm can move only
one block at a time, and no other block should be stacked on top of the
block which is to be moved by the robot arm.

Our aim is to change the configuration of the blocks from the Initial State
to the Goal State, both of which have been specified in the diagram above.

What is Goal Stack Planning?

Goal Stack Planning is one of the earliest methods in artificial intelligence

in which we work backwards from the goal state to the initial state.

We start at the goal state and we try fulfilling the preconditions required to
achieve the initial state. These preconditions in turn have their own set of
preconditions, which are required to be satisfied first. We keep solving
these “goals” and “sub-goals” until we finally arrive at the Initial State. We
make use of a stack to hold these goals that need to be fulfilled
as well the actions that we need to perform for the same.

Apart from the “Initial State” and the “Goal State”, we maintain a “World
State” configuration as well. Goal Stack uses this world state to work its
way from Goal State to Initial State. World State on the other hand starts
off as the Initial State and ends up being transformed into the Goal state.

At the end of this algorithm we are left with an empty stack and a set of
actions which helps us navigate from the Initial State to the World State.

Representing the configurations as a list of “predicates”

Predicates can be thought of as a statement which helps us convey the
information about a configuration in Blocks World.

Given below are the list of predicates as well as their intended meaning

1. ON(A,B) : Block A is on B

2. ONTABLE(A) : A is on table

3. CLEAR(A) : Nothing is on top of A

4. HOLDING(A) : Arm is holding A.

5. ARMEMPTY : Arm is holding nothing

Using these predicates, we represent the Initial State and the Goal State in
our example like this:

Initial State — ON(B,A) ∧ ONTABLE(A) ∧ ONTABLE(C) ∧ ONTABLE(D)

∧ CLEAR(B) ∧ CLEAR(C) ∧ CLEAR(D) ∧ ARMEMPTY

Initial State

Goal State — ON(C,A) ∧ ON(B,D) ∧ ONTABLE(A) ∧ ONTABLE(D) ∧

CLEAR(B) ∧ CLEAR(C) ∧ ARMEMPTY
Goal State

Thus a configuration can be thought of as a list of predicates describing the

current scenario.

“Operations” performed by the robot arm

The Robot Arm can perform 4 operations:

1. STACK(X,Y) : Stacking Block X on Block Y

2. UNSTACK(X,Y) : Picking up Block X which is on top of Block Y

3. PICKUP(X) : Picking up Block X which is on top of the table

4. PUTDOWN(X) : Put Block X on the table

All the four operations have certain preconditions which need to be

satisfied to perform the same. These preconditions are represented in the
form of predicates.

The effect of these operations is represented using two

lists ADD and DELETE. DELETE List contains the predicates which will
cease to be true once the operation is performed. ADD List on the other
hand contains the predicates which will become true once the operation is
performed.

The Precondition, Add and Delete List for each operation is rather
intuitive and have been listed below.

Operations performed by the Robot Arm

For example, to perform the STACK(X,Y) operation i.e. to Stack Block X

on top of Block Y, No other block should be on top of Y (CLEAR(Y)) and
the Robot Arm should be holding the Block X (HOLDING(X)).

Once the operation is performed, these predicates will cease to be true,

thus they are included in DELETE List as well. (Note : It is not necessary
for the Precondition and DELETE List to be the exact same).

On the other hand, once the operation is performed, The robot arm will be
free (ARMEMPTY) and the block X will be on top of Y (ON(X,Y)).

The other 3 Operators follow similar logic, and this part is the cornerstone
of Goal Stack Planning.

Python3 Code for Goal Stack Planning

We can think of Predicates and Operations as objects which we need to
push and pop off the Stack of our Goal Stack Planner. Keeping this in
mind, we start off by creating a class for each predicate and each
operation.

In the classes for operators I have included the methods to return the
Predicates of Prerequisite, Add and Delete list.

On the other hand, in the classes for Predicates I have included get_action
method which returns the Operator required to fulfill the unsatisfied
Predicate.

I’ve included an example of a Predicate (ON(X,Y)) and an

Operation.(STACK(X,Y)) below.
On(X,Y) Predicate Class
STACK(X,Y) Predicate Operation

Following this, I have a class GoalStackPlanner which takes in the initial

state and the goal state as it’s parameters. It returns the steps which need
to be carried out to convert initial state to goal state.
Goal Stack Planner Class

Now that we have defined the necessary Classes, Here is an example for
running our Goal Stack Planner
Running Goal Stack Planner

As you can see, we have stored the steps from initial state to goal state in
the variable steps.

In this example, steps = [PICKUP(C), PUTDOWN(C), UNSTACK(B,A),

PUTDOWN(B), PICKUP(C), STACK(C,A), PICKUP(B), STACK(B,D)]

The visual representation of our steps variable looks like this.

Now that we are done with the explanation of Goal Stack Planner and
Blocks World, Here is the full Python Code.