While many senior executives continue to talk about the "voice of the customer," few demonstrate their commitment to this concept by spending time with customers. Many continue to use their intuition or `golden gut' in their attempt to provide superior customer value. Unfortunately, `senior executive intuition' is rarely attuned to the needs of their customers. While the competitive environment continues to intensify, executives have cut back on the time devoted to customers just when it should be increasing. This article discusses the need for senior executives to spend time with customers and provides examples of the benefits that this approach will provide.

Computers require intelligence to solve problems. Knowledge acquisition makes the process intelligent by updating knowledge to the knowledge base. Machine learning serves this purpose with its effective techniques. This paper explores the various machine learning techniques, which help computers in knowledge acquiring, thus improving their knowledge base.

computers require knowledge to become intelligent. Knowledge is factual or procedural information. Knowledge is the combined result of learning, experience, and training. As the computers require knowledge, they need to acquire knowledge. Knowledge acquisition is the process of adding new knowledge to the knowledge base, which is a highly abstracted, structured, condensed and often formalized source of knowledge. Knowledge acquisition may also improve the existing knowledge. In the knowledge acquisition process, initially, a knowledge engineer an expert in gathering knowledgeinterviews the domain experts and collects the necessary information. The information so collected is translated into a form suitable for further processing by the computer system. Once the initial system is built, it must be refined again and again in order to make it a perfect one. But this process is time consuming and has lots of drawbacks. So, it is wise to go for automatic or semi-automatic knowledge acquisition. That is, the computer is collecting knowledge without any or with less assistance. In this paper, the author has explored the important machine learning techniques which allow computers to acquire knowledge.

Over the past decade, machine learning, due to a lot of research work, has proved that it has a significant commercial value. Machine-learning algorithms have now learned to detect credit card fraud by mining data on past transactions, learned to drive vehicles automatically on highways, and learned the reading interests of many individuals to assemble personally customized electronic news abstracts. Machine learning refers to a system capable of acquiring and integrating the knowledge automatically. The capability of the systems to learn from experience, training, analytical observation, and other means, results in a system that can continuously self-improve and thereby exhibit efficiency and effectiveness. machine learning system usually starts with some knowledge and a corresponding knowledge organization so that it can interpret, analyze, and test the knowledge acquired.

Knowledge Acquisition through Machine Learning, Knowledge acquisition, effective techniques, procedural information, machine learning techniques, Machine-learning algorithms, knowledge organization, electronic news abstracts.