Frame (artificial intelligence)

Frames were proposed by Marvin Minsky in his 1974 article "A Framework for Representing Knowledge." A frame is an artificial intelligence data structure used to divide knowledge into substructures by representing "stereotyped situations." Frames are the primary data structure used in artificial intelligence frame language.

Frames are also an extensive part of knowledge representation and reasoning schemes. Frames were originally derived from semantic networks and are therefore part of structure based knowledge representations. According to Russell and Norvig's "Artificial Intelligence, A Modern Approach," structural representations assemble "...facts about particular object and event types and arrange the types into a large taxonomic hierarchy analogous to a biological taxonomy."

The frame contains information on how to use the frame, what to expect next, and what to do when these expectations are not met. Some information in the frame is generally unchanged while other information, stored in "terminals," usually change. Different frames may share the same terminals.

Each piece of information about a particular frame is held in a slot. The information can contain:

A frame's terminals are already filled with default values, which is based on how the human mind works. For example, when a person is told "a boy kicks a ball," most people will visualize a particular ball (such as a familiar soccer ball) rather than imagining some abstract ball with no attributes.

One particular strength of frame based knowledge representations is that, unlike semantic networks, they allow for exceptions in particular instances. This gives frames an amount of flexibility that allow representations of real world phenomena to be reflected more accurately.

Like semantic networks, frames can be queried using spreading activation. Following the rules of inheritance, any value given to a slot that is inherited by subframes will be updated (IF-ADDED) to the corresponding slots in the subframes and any new instances of a particular frame will feature that new value as the default.

Because frames are structurally based, it is possible to generate a semantic network given a set of frames even though it lacks explicit arcs. The reference to Minsky's teacher Noam Chomsky and his generative grammar of 1950 is generally missing in Minsky's publications. However, the semantic strength is originated by that concept.

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