The Design and Structure of the Finance Adviser System for Consulting Financial Systems

Abstract

This paper presents the design and structure of the Finance Adviser system which is a knowledge-based consultation system. This system advises its users, usually owners of small-and medium-sized enterprises, on financial systems provided by governments for raising funds. A main function of this system is introducing suitable financial systems to users, which meet requirements and constraints set by users. This system includes the description of several types of knowledge with respect to financial systems and terms used in the process of consultation on fund raising, as its knowledgebase. That is, the knowledgebase consists of the descriptions of each financial system which will be an object of consultation and the descriptions of knowledge that are used for judgement whether a user meets conditions involved in some financial systems or not, for representation of funding aims of each system and for defining terms employed to organize a thesaurus. The thesaurus consists of two types of collections of terms. 0ne type is used by end users, many of them are usually ordinal civilians, the other is technical ones used by administrative specialists. Those two types of terms are co-related so as to achieve a better man-machine interface. That is, they are useful for seeking appropriate fiancial systems basing upon daily used terms which represent users' concrete desire for which the fund is spent, conventional terms used for naming of machine expected to be introduced into a factory, and so on. In essence, the thesaurus is constructed for narrowing semantical gaps between terms in daily language and terms in technical one by transforming the former into the latter. The technical terms are directly corelated with corresponding financial systems. By executing question-answering in daily language, the finance adviser system infers purposes of fund raising which are appropriate or relevant to find possible financial systems. Our experiments show that the system seeks suitable financial systems when measured using both recall-precision and usefulness.