The Policy Arguer ( POLI) is a working expert system model of U.S. foreign policy belief systems toward Asia. Expert systems—computer programs that imitate the behavior of human experts in constrained domains—have become a useful mode of inquiry for research problems in a number of the social sciences. POLI reproduces U.S. foreign policy outputs and the underlying debates and arguments. Foreign policy is explained in terms of the process that converts beliefs into arguments and policies. This paper describes the model in some detail, including its structure and program flow as well as the extraction of its knowledge bases. Keywords: belief systems, computational modeling, expert systems, decision making, fuzzy logic, international relations, U.S. foreign policy.
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