Statistical expert systems are attracting increasing attention as a possible way to alleviate the shortage of expert consultant statisticians. This paper summarises the requirements of such systems, showing how the demands of data analysis are different from those of other fields, and describes some recent work.

The computer industry is in the early stages of a revolution. Its capability for processing natural languages will advance dramatically over the next few years. As a result, computer systems which deal with human language will begin to play a central role in the industry. Computers will becooome significantly more accessible to many people, and many tasks which are wholly manual will be handled electronically.

The concept of an expert system covers an increasingly large group of software packages which often have more dissimilarities than points in common. We shall not attempt to give a precise definition of an expert system here, because this might impose too restrictive a framework on the rest of our discussion. We shall simply state that, as is generally recognized, an expert system is a piece of software intended to resolve a certain category of problems, that it uses for this purpose a large quantity of knowledge specific to the field in question, and that in each expert system there is a very distinct separation between this knowledge and the procedures which make use of it.