Standardising the elimination of unnecessary data from interview transcripts for the purposes of knowledge-based systems - a case study

: Although knowledge elicitation, the process of extracting knowledge from human experts to be incorporated into a knowledge‐based system, has been the subject of some notable studies, less attention has been paid to the methods of analysing the raw data once it has been extracted from the expert. When knowledge elicitation sessions are interview‐based, the resultant form of raw data is usually a transcript of the interviewee's utterances. This paper describes an investigation into the preliminary stage of analysing such transcripts. It outlines the development of an approach to eliminate unnecessary detail from interview transcripts, thus enabling attention to be focused upon the remaining, more relevant data via a simple technique based upon cheap and readily available technology. The paper then outlines a rapid‐prototyping approach for evaluating this method, the results of which were felt to be very encouraging.